In Madrid, the terrorists showed they’d learned those lessons well. They used a very simple delivery system: 13 backpacks and gym bags left lying around in commuter trains as they pulled into three crowded stations. Each held about 25 pounds of a high explosive. The detonators were wired to the phones. When they rang, 10 of the bombs went off. In the carnage afterward, as 200 people lay dead or dying, and an additional 1,500 of the injured screamed and staggered beside the tracks, witnesses remember that other phones, the personal ones on the mangled corpses, started to ring, too, in a horrible cacophony. Friends and relatives were trying to reach the people they loved.
Europe suddenly heard the echoes of 9/11, a hint of those last words from the burning towers, of the shock, of the terrible confusion and uncertainty about who could be responsible for such an outrage. And those cell phones may have given Spanish investigators their first big break in tracking down the killers. On Saturday night, Interior Minister Angel Acebes announced five arrests in the case: three Moroccan Arabs and two Indians. All were linked to the purchase of a cheap Trium phone and phone card found in one of the bombs that didn’t go off. Then the Interior Ministry announced that a videotape had been found near Madrid’s enormous modern mosque on the outskirts of the city. On the tape, according to the ministry, a man speaking in Arabic with a Moroccan accent said he was the “military” leader of Al Qaeda in Europe and claimed responsibility for the bombings.
Do these first arrests and this tape prove Osama bin Laden’s organization was indeed behind the bombings? Spanish investigators remained cautious. On the eve of national elections, they were under pressure to release every scrap of information about the bombings, even if they suspected the terrorists’ trail ultimately led in another direction.
What is known beyond doubt is that no coordinated terrorist operation remotely as big as this had ever hit Western Europe before. It was, at the very least, a powerful reminder that such atrocities can happen anywhere, including the United States. For the moment, the official American “threat level” has not gone up. Officials say they haven’t picked up the kind of “chatter” among terrorists that put them on edge–and the alert warning at Orange–last December. Security has been conspicuously increased for trains and subways, especially in the crowded Northeast corridor. But Stephen Flynn, author of a forthcoming book about the deficiencies of homeland security, warns that U.S. officials are kidding themselves if they think they could have prevented an attack like the one in Madrid. “We are equally vulnerable,” says Flynn.
As experts looked at the modus operandi, the forensics, the possible political motives, there was only one clear consensus last week: the worry that Al Qaeda’s global campaign of terror has raised the threshold of horror so high that other groups–who may share all, or some, or none of Al Qaeda’s other goals–are embracing its terrorist tradecraft and its penchant for mass murder. Major attacks, slaughtering dozens of civilians at a time, have risen dramatically in the last year and a half. “Terrorism is a means of communication,” says Richard Evans, of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, and today any group “has to compete for attention from the world media with Al Qaeda and the jihadist organizations.”
Yet without knowing who was behind the mass killings in Madrid, it was hard to get the message, if there had been one to get. Last week the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar thought that most of the evidence pointed toward the Basque separatist movement ETA, which has waged a chronic campaign of terror against Spanish regimes since 1968. If so, ETA killed in one day almost a quarter as many people as it had killed in the previous 36 years. Other experts suspected, even before Saturday’s arrests, that Al Qaeda or some like-minded spinoff was responsible.
A third possibility loomed as even more frightening: some sort of connection between Europe’s national separatists and the fanatical followers of Osama bin Laden. At the very least, we know that some terrorists are trying to emulate others. According to Roland Jacquard, a French terrorism expert, police raids on ETA safe houses in southern France since 2001 have turned up newspaper clippings with operational details about the bombing campaigns of Al Qaeda and Palestinian groups. But there might also have been more-active collusion in the Madrid atrocity. “You have some aspects of the attack that reflect the signatures of ETA, others that are Al Qaeda,” says Yonah Alexander, of the Potomac Institute in Washington. “I tend to believe it’s a combination.”
There is no question that Al Qaeda had an extensive support network in Spain before the September 2001 attacks on the United States. One alleged member of a cell arrested in November that year was Luis Jose Galan Gonzalez, known as Yusuf Galan. He had worked closely with the ETA political-front group Herri Batasuna in the late 1980s before converting to Islam. In July 2001, according to Spanish court documents, he traveled to Indonesia to train with one of the groups there that is linked to Al Qaeda.
Nationalist terrorist groups have long records of what Bruce Hoffman at the Rand Corporation calls “cross-pollination.” ETA has ties to various of the Irish Republican Army’s factions, including the Provisional IRA, which has “the most accomplished engineering department of any terrorist group in the world,” says Jane’s Evans. Some Irish bombmaking experts were traced to Afghanistan, where they were working with Al Qaeda before 9/11, according to two U.S. government sources who saw intelligence reports in that connection. Both ETA and the IRA have also developed extensive contacts with guerrilla and terrorist groups in South America, including the FARC in Colombia.
Part of Al Qaeda’s strategy from the beginning was to sow chaos by making its terrorist tradecraft available to the widest possible audience. “By pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth” was one of the mottoes at the beginning of its training manual. As a result, the last two years have seen terror metastasizing like a cancer, despite all the efforts to eradicate it. In U.S.-occupied Iraq, it’s not clear how much of the terrorist resistance is directed by Al Qaeda, how much merely inspired by its actions, but the effects have been devastating as the attackers constantly modify their tactics. There, suicide bombers have become what one intelligence officer calls “just another delivery system.” Such terror groups and cells–whether in Iraq or Chechnya or Saudi Arabia–“believe in the rejuvenating element of a spectacular terrorist attack,” says Hoffman.
One hope lies, perhaps, in the kind of statement made by the estimated 11 million people who poured into the streets of Spain last week. A quarter of the entire population, they marched to show they were not afraid, and would never accept the terror directed against them, whoever and whatever was behind it.
