Lone wolf threat – on the increase
A tremendous amount of effort is being expended by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to counter the threat from lone-wolf terrorists. What exactly is the threat from this type of actor, and why are they so dangerous?
The most prominent terrorist attacks against Western targets over the last few years were the Fort Hood shootings, the bombing and shootings in Norway by Anders Breivik, and the Boston Marathon bombings. All of these events were perpetrated by ostensibly lone-wolf actors (the fact the Boston bombings were conducted by two brothers notwithstanding).
Four key areas of enquiry spring up when considering the threat from lone-wolf terrorists. Firstly, what exactly are lone-wolf terrorists, and in what way do they differ from other types of terrorist actor? Secondly, why is this type of terrorist considered to be so dangerous? Thirdly, what exactly is the threat, and can it be accurately quantified? And finally, how might this threat be mitigated in the future?
Lone wolves
Defining terrorism is a thorny issue; one that has yet to be resolved (see box). By extension, therefore, defining a terrorist is equally difficult. It would be usual to classify a terrorist as someone who engages in acts of terrorism, but ultimately a definition of the act still has to be distilled. Lone wolves make this even more difficult.
Jeffrey Simon, an expert on terrorism and political violence, and author of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat, classifies five basic types of lone-wolf terrorist: secular, religious, single-issue, idiosyncratic, and criminal, although some lone wolves fall into more than one category.
This author takes issue with Simon’s ‘criminal’ category (see below), but the other four provide a good basis for understanding the types of lone-wolf terrorist.
According to Simon, secular lone wolves, like secular terrorist groups, commit violent attacks for political, ethnic-nationalist, or separatist causes. Timothy McVeigh was motivated by revenge for the US government raid on the Branch Davidian cult’s compound in Waco two years earlier when he committed his 1995 attack. Although Anders Breivik is certainly anti-Muslim, Simon notes, he also falls into the secular category because his main targets were not Muslims, but rather the teens attending a camp run by the ruling Labor Party, which he blamed for allowing the “Islamic colonisation and Islamisation of Western Europe.”
Simon’s ‘religious’ lone wolf is one who perpetrates terrorism in the name of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or some other belief system. Major Hasan, of the Fort Hood shootings, falls into that category, having been radicalised, in part, through e-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Islamic extremist cleric.
The third type of lone-wolf terrorist is the single-issue lone wolf, who carries out attacks in the name of a specific issue, such as abortion, animal rights, or the environment. Examples of this type include: Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion militant who set off a bomb at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta and then bombed abortion clinics; and Volkert van der Graaf, an animal-rights extremist who assassinated a Dutch politician who was lobbying to make mink farming legal.
The fourth type of lone-wolf terrorist is the idiosyncratic lone wolf, who is motivated largely by personal demons. As Simon points out, although the idiosyncratic lone wolf may commit attacks in the name of some cause, those causes are often irrational, and the perpetrators are driven to violence chiefly by severe personality and psychological problems. Examples include: Theodore Kaczynski, a paranoid schizophrenic, who called for a revolution against the industrial-technological society; Muharem Kurbegovic (commonly known as the Alphabet Bomber), also a paranoid schizophrenic, who set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport in 1974 and demanded that all immigration, naturalisation, and sex laws be declared unconstitutional; and Jared Loughner, also with mental health problems, who killed several people in a failed attempt to assassinate Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011.
Up until this point, Simon’s classifications seem correct. He also defines a ‘criminal’ class of lone-wolf terrorist, however. Simon believes that the criminal lone wolf is motivated mainly by money and personal gain, as opposed to political, social, religious, or ethnic-nationalist goals.
This author believes that it is here that too-broad definitions can ‘muddy the waters’. Simon suggests that there are some cases where criminal activity has so great an effect on society and government that it should be considered terrorism, and as an example cites the first major midair plane bombing in US history in 1955, when John Gilbert Graham put dynamite in his mother’s luggage before she boarded a United Airlines flight out of Denver in the hope of collecting on her life insurance. In the event, forty-four people were killed, including Graham’s mother.
Nevertheless, this author contends that a criminal act may be heinous without necessarily being terrorist. Although Graham showed a total and callous disregard for the lives of others, his act was still just a murder for profit.
Simon also suggests that Bruce Ivins, the Army microbiologist responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks (Amerithrax), was a criminal terrorist, as he wanted to secure additional funding to expand his anthrax research programme. However, documentation relating to Ivins’ motivations, including interview transcripts from the original investigation, suggests an ideological motivation. Through his work with bio-weapons he became convinced that it was only a matter of time before a genuine enemy of the US conducted a major terrorist attack using anthrax, and that the government was too complacent. His urge to stimulate greater emphasis on bioterrorism research was not for personal gain. Rather, he believed he was acting, ultimately, in the best interests of the country and that the ends justified the means; a vanguard of a self-appointed elite – a term often used to describe a terrorist. Due to his obsessive pursuit of his goal Ivins falls more comfortably under the classification of a ‘single-issue’ terrorist, and, depending on his state of mind, possibly also ‘idiosyncratic’.
- The definitional headache
The problem with definitions of terrorism is that they tend either to be so broad that they capture everything (including acts which, it could be argued, are not really terrorist acts when taken case-by-case), or they are so narrow they exclude acts that most people would instinctively accept as terrorist.
In the wake of the ‘Munich massacre’ at the 1972 Olympics the UN established six separate working groups, all with the mandate of accurately defining terrorism. They have yet to succeed. Most definitions include certain key elements, commonly: a political or ideological motive for the act; the symbolism of the act itself; and a defined target population (who might or might not be the actual victims of the act).
As Jeffrey Bale of the Monterey Terrorism & Research Education Program has pointed out, in a general sense terrorist violence can be distinguished from ordinary violence by considering whether it is ‘dyadic’ or ‘triadic’.
Bale writes that most acts of violence are dyadic, which is to say they involve only two parties or protagonists: the perpetrators and the victims. However, acts of terrorism are triadic, meaning they involve three parties or protagonists: the perpetrators, the victims, and a wider target audience. Thus, Bale considers terrorism to be “violence that is consciously carried out by the perpetrators primarily in order to influence the attitudes and behaviour of a wider target audience (or multiple target audiences).” As he, among others, has pointed out it is violence for psychological effect. This is not a definition, of course. It would be far too broad and would capture many violent crimes that are not terrorist acts.
The definition that Bale (and also this author usually) uses, as defined by Schmid and Jongman in 1988, is:
Terrorism is the use or threatened use of violence, directed against victims selected for their symbolic or representative value, as a means of instilling anxiety in, transmitting one or more messages to, and thereby manipulating the attitudes and behaviour of a wider target audience or audiences.
There are other elements that sometimes come into some people’s definitions, such as the need for victims to be non-combatants. Indeed, a commonly applied definition by US agencies (although, again, it can vary depending on the agency) is that “‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.”
The difficulty here is in defining ‘non-combatant’. If, as with the Fort Hood shootings, the targets are serving in the military, are they non-combatants, and does the fact that they are on home soil make a difference? To be a combatant, does the country have to be at war? Does the war have to be against another state, or can it be against a non-state group, or against an abstract noun? If the terrorist considers himself to be at war against the country, does that make soldiers belonging to the victim country combatants whether they acknowledge it themselves or not? These are just a few of the questions that are commonly raised in this debate; there are plenty more.
Why so dangerous?
Even terrorists are usually constrained by some pressure to conform. The construct to which they are trying to conform may not seem normal, or even logical, to most people, but it at least means there is often a certain logic to their actions if not their motives.
Also, terrorists who act as part of a group have to communicate, and there is a limited number of ways this can be done.
Both of these are factors that do not apply to lone wolves. Operating by themselves, entirely on their own initiative, there is no group pressure or decision-making process that might constrain a lone wolf; no peer group to suggest that a plan is too wild; no hierarchical command structure to veto an operation because it is not suitably aligned with the larger organisation’s raison d’etre. The danger here is that because there is no outside influence the scale of a terrorist attack will be constrained only by what the individual can achieve, rather than by a commanding authority.
Lone wolves tend to have fewer external concerns than a group. A terrorist organisation that wishes to continue existing for a long period of time needs to maintain a popular support base, and this means not alienating itself in the eyes of its supporters. That is unlikely to be the case for a lone-wolf terrorist.
Working alone, there are usually no communications to intercept or co-conspirators to arrest and interrogate. A lone wolf is able to operate with a much smaller footprint. That does not mean there are no traces that can be found; that the radicalisation of an individual into a lone-wolf terrorist is never detectable. But it is much more difficult.
So, although a lone-wolf terrorist might not have the resources and backing of a larger terrorist group, the real danger is that they are hard to identify and unpredictable.
Is the threat real?
A few years ago, in the period beginning with the 9/11 attacks and running up to the 7/7 bombings in London, the perceived major terrorist threat to Western countries was from groups. There were lone-wolf attacks in that period as well, but the emphasis was on groups, particularly al-Qaeda inspired cells.
Since the 7/7 bombings, however, there has been no successful, major, group-based terrorist attack in the West (although there have been small scale attacks, and events such as the bombing of Madrid-Baraja Airport in 2006 by ETA which killed two and injured a further 52 is could be considered a ‘borderline major’ attack).
But there have been several lone-wolf attacks, the most notable of which are mentioned above: Anders Breivik’s attacks in Norway, the Fort Hood shootings and the Boston Marathon bombings.
A 2011 report by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, entitled A ticking time bomb – Counterterrorism lessons from the US Government’s failure to prevent the Fort Hood attack, points out that in the past face-to-face interactions were essential for violent Islamist extremist groups to identify followers and to facilitate the radicalisation process.
However, face-to-face interactions have begun to be replaced by the internet as the primary means by which violent Islamist extremism has spread globally. Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist extremists recognised the potency of the internet after 9/11 when they created a relatively structured, online media campaign that targeted western audiences. Over time, violent Islamist extremists have continued to evolve and improve their ability to use the web to broadcast their ideology. Their violent propaganda has spread from password protected forums to include “mainstream” sites. As the committee’s report points out, the incidence of home-grown terrorism in the US has increased significantly in the past two years compared to the years since 9/11. From May 2009 to November 2010, there were 22 different home-grown plots, compared to 21 such plots from September 2001 to May 2009.
In the UK, government, security agency and law enforcement officials also believe the threat is not only real, but growing. A particularly acute threat in UK at the moment is considered to be from far-right extremists. Officials are seriously worried about a UK repeat of Breivik’s attack.
According to Charles Far, director-general of the UK’s Office for Security and Counter-terrorism, the extreme right-wing terrorist threat is primarily from lone actors. As he has noted recently, and we discussed above, “lone actor threats are often more challenging because groups often have weaknesses, whereas determined lone actors rarely do.” He also pointed out that these lone wolves are “often more proficient than actors who we may see at the other end of the terrorist spectrum.”
UK threat assessment describes the security profile of the far-right lone wolf as a a male who is older than his Islamist counterpart, more integrated in his community, with a stronger history of education and employment and who is more skilled at acquiring weapons.
There is recent precedent for far-right extremism in the UK. Pavlo Lapshyn had been in Britain for only five days before he murdered Mohammed Saleem, 82, in Birmingham in April this year and embarked on his bombing campaign.
Lapshyn’s ability to act alone, and the speed at which he began his self-styled mission “to increase racial conflict” after arriving in Birmingham on a work placement, alarmed police and security agencies, and highlights our vulnerability to lone-wolf attacks.
Pavlo Lapshyn was only 25, which might point to the additional challenge that relatively open borders present – the security profile of an extreme right-wing terrorist may be different if the perpetrator is of overseas origin.
- Pavlo Lapshyn
Early in his police interviews Pavlo Lapshyn said, “I would like to increase racial conflict, because they are not white, and I am white.”
Admitting the murder of Mr Saleem, he said: “I have a racial hatred so I have a motivation – a racial motivation, and racial hatred.”
More typical examples are former British National Party (BNP) member Terence Gavan, 42, who was gaoled for 11 years in 2010 after police found an arsenal of guns and explosives in his home in West Yorkshire, and Ian Davison, 44, who ran a website called Aryan Strike Force, who was gaoled for ten years (also in 2010) for manufacturing Ricin.
As Mr Farr said, “The biggest weapons caches found in [the UK] in the last five years have been connected with people sympathetic to extreme right-wing causes. More than 30 guns and about 50 explosive devices were found in the possession of Terence Gavan. In terms of sheer quantity, there have been no comparable seizures made in connected with militant Islamists.”
So the threat is real. It is demonstrably so, as there have been lone-wolf attacks in the recent past. This, combined with the fact that it is so easy for lone-wolves to remain unnoticed, means that threat must be given serious attention.
Threat mitigation
Lone-wolf terrorists are hard to spot, but they are usually not invisible. Bruce Ivins was working in a position for which he had to have myriad security clearances and psychological profiles, and was surrounded by colleagues every day. He presented a great number of warning signs but though some of these were spotted, information was not shared and acted upon sufficiently. Arguably, due to the lessons learnt from the Amerithrax investigation, a similar potential terrorist would be prevented from achieving his goal now.
As we discussed above, one of the factors contributing to the radicalisation of vulnerable individuals is the increased availability of propaganda material on the internet. However, lone-wolf terrorists are not just using the internet to access propaganda. A study, published in 2012 by Professor Gabriel Weimann of the University of Haifa, reveals that these lone wolves might not actually be so isolated, and belong to virtual terrorist communities on the internet.
The research, which took more than a decade, involved the surveying of encoded and public international terror organisation websites, as well as sites supporting these organisations, forums, video clips, and whatever information that could be found on the internet relating to global terrorism. According to Weimann, most of the lone wolves make contact, share information, and acquire training through the internet, whether from sites linked with terror organisations, from forums supporting such organisations, or from other platforms. In addition to this sort of activity on the web, social networks provide these individuals with their virtual ‘wolfpack’: a virtual community of people who think like them, who share their ideals, and with whom they can consult and share advice.
As Weimann noted in the press release when the study was published, “The virtual community gives the ‘lone wolf’ social environment, support, and moral encouragement.”
The research also presents a number of examples of such terrorists who supposedly acted alone. As we mentioned above, major Nidal Hasan had communicated with a known terrorist via the internet. Arif Uka, a young Bosnian who shot and killed American soldiers in Frankfurt, was a Facebook friend of various known Islamist radicals.
Another known example is the internet activity that followed Mohamed Merah’s attack killing four Jews in Toulouse in March 2012. Monitoring the web, Weimann observed that immediately after Merah was killed in a police siege, members of Jihadist online forums began praising Merah’s act and encouraged additional acts like it. A Facebook page praising the killings was promptly created and by the time it was closed down with the involvement of the French government, 500 Facebook users had joined it. According to Weimann, it is these types of forums and activity that must be monitored to locate and identify the next lone wolf.
Professor Weimann wrote, “Enlistment, confidence building, explanations as well as social support for the ‘lone wolves’ are all becoming available on the internet. These sites can be monitored. Depending on how deeply the law will get involved in this sort of internet activity is what will determine the time it takes to sound the alarm on an individualist’s intended act of terror. Clearly, undercover agents will be able to penetrate the terrorists’ social networks by becoming more familiar with this sort of activity.”
Conclusions
A lone-wolf terrorist may act alone, but he is not necessarily completely isolated. The monitoring of online communication by Western intelligence agencies is not flavour of the month currently, but it is precisely this type of activity that will be necessary to prevent vulnerable individuals from continuing down the road to radicalisation.
However, they are still very hard to identify, and there will be some who will not leave an obvious trail of breadcrumbs online. It is very easy, in the wake of an attack, to point to all the things that could have been done better by the authorities, and in some cases these criticisms are justified. But it is also worth bearing mind that there could be hundreds, possibly thousands, of individuals who present the same profile of a troubled individual, who do not go on to commit an act of terrorism. Investigating every single one of these individuals with equal vigour is virtually impossible.
It is precisely this that makes the threat almost impossible to accurately quantify. There are many potential actors, and the authorities are succeeding at tackling many of them, which allows for a degree of statistical analysis, but it is impossible to know how many others are waiting in the wings.
Ultimately, the only hope intelligence and law enforcement agencies have of succeeding against lone wolves is to keep up with the ever-evolving trends in dissemination of propaganda and terrorist-training material.