But perhaps more important than the impact within what was on its way to becoming Israel and Palestine was the example the PLO had set for the world. Munich’s horrible violence hadn’t just been watched live in living rooms across the globe, in the months that followed it was re-aired countless times – helping the contagion of terror to catch on and encouraging imitators.6.5 And so since inside four-years “a handful of Palestinian terrorists had overcome a quarter-century of neglect and obscurity” and “achieved what diplomats, statesmen, lobbyists and humanitarian workers had persistently tried and failed to do” the rest of the world was quick to take note. Within a decade the number of discrete groups committing acts of terrorism either on the international stage or against foreign targets in their own nation had more than quadrupled.7 All of this change after just fifteen-hours of terror.
America’s first personal experience with this method began thirteen years later, in 1985, minutes after Robert Stethem’s shattered body gave up its final traces of warmth to the chilled macadam pressed against it.
Once the trucks carrying the hostages, all American males, from TWA Flight 847 had reached their destinations somewhere within Beirut’s suburbs the terrorists issued their demand: the hostages would only be freed when 776 Shiites held in Israeli jails were released. Because of the seeming tactical nature of this demand it would seem that it’s an act of Tactical Terror, however this is one of the cases that serves well to trace out the fact that Tactical Terror and Symbolic Terror in fact lay on the ends of a spectrum. The most important point in proving that this instance of terrorism is evenly balanced is that, although it’s easy to forget, at the time of the hijackings Hezbollah was still coalescing as a group.
Today it’s widely held that the 1983 bombings of the Marine barracks were carried out by Hezbollah, but this is an oversimplification. As it was mentioned earlier, training for the attacks was provided by both the Syrian and Iranian armies, as were the plastic explosives used in the attack. And the attack itself was ordered from Tehran. Hezbollah, as a discrete group as we now think of it, at the time did not yet exist as discretely as it does now. In fact, it took well over a decade for responsibility to be either claimed or ascribed to Hezbollah – for a very long while we weren’t sure who had carried out the attack, and no one claimed to have done it.
Elements that would eventually become a part of Hezbollah, but which in 1983 didn’t have a singular group identity, did execute the attack. But they didn’t act on their own and would’ve been incapable of carrying it out without the training and materiel supplied by the Syrian and Iranian armies. And so in 1985 Hezbollah was still struggling to define itself and gain support within Lebanon, necessitating an act of Symbolic Terror to help win adherents to flesh out the group’s ideological framework. The release of prisoners would’ve been a tactical victory, but that demand was more a moral justification for violence.
All that said, what this attack tells us most about isn’t the debate about whether it was more an act of Tactical or Symbolic Terror. It was, like all acts of terrorism, a bit of each – but more importantly it was a watershed event which totally shifted the media-driven calculus of context and perception which all acts of terror are perceived by. What the hostage situation following the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 changed lies outside this spectrum, and within the cameras, editing rooms, and eventually living rooms of America.
Within days of the hostages being taken, the three major American television networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – deployed a “small army of reporters, field producers, editors, camera crew and sound technicians” to the scene of the Breaking News. Beirut’s American population had grown over the course of just a few days by eighty-five, all employees of the three major networks. This sent a clear message to the American public, that “no other news of any significance was occurring anywhere else.”8
As the days went on, the networks justified the presence of their personnel in Beiruit by creating “news” to justify their continued heavy presence in Beirut. What emerged was a gross imbalance between soft human-interest stories mostly covering the hostages’ families back home, and coverage of real issues such as the Reagan administration’s efforts to reach a resolution.
Over the course of the seventeen-day crisis almost five-hundred discrete segments were aired by the three major networks, for an average of almost twenty-nine a day. Each evening during the seventeen-day crisis about two-thirds of every networks flagship news story focused on the hostage crisis, and regular programs were interrupted at least eighty times by news bulletins or special reports.9 In contrast, Munich lasted only fifteen-hours. And perhaps more indicative of the importance of this attack wasn’t just the sum total of the coverage, but the tone that coverage was taking.
The Reagan administration was eventually pushed by the American public to compel Israel to release 756 of the imprisoned Shiites, due in part to the tone of the media coverage. Combined with the soft human-interest stories that were creating news when there really was none was the tone of the commentary, which “repeatedly and unthinkingly equated the wanton kidnapping of entirely innocent airline passengers… with Shi’a militiamen and suspected terrorists detained by Israeli troops.”10
The bias of the major news networks became so wanton that a running joke among journalists was that NBC actually denoted “the Nabih Berri Company,” Nabih Berri being the leader of the militia whose men were being held by Israel. This biased tone was not just a mistake made by the major American media networks. It was, for the first time, the result of the concentrated and well-planned effort by the terrorists. The terrorists intentionally manufactured a “perverted form of show business”11 through spin-doctors of the hostage takers, who met with the American journalists. These spin-doctors, many of whom graduated with media studies degrees from American colleges, wove a polished PR campaign that was consciously and successfully aimed at manipulating media coverage of the event.
Hijacking, the fate of Flight 847 demonstrated, didn’t have to be confined to airplanes. By hijacking the media the terrorists were able to bring a crisis into the living rooms of every Americans for the better part of a month. Terrorism as “a violent act that is conceived specifically to attract attention and then, through the publicity it generates, to communicate a message” was brought against America for the first time with TWA Flight 847.12
And unlike the media coverage of the Munich Olympic Games, which was in comparison rather fleeting and taken for granted by the PLO, the extended coverage of this hostage crisis was engineered and manufactured by the terrorists who carried it out to both target a specific audience and be drawn out as long as necessary. Munich showed that the modern mass media had the potential to be an invaluable tool to the terrorist, and Flight 847 proved that the terrorists could actively work to use this tool to carve out perceptions that would be carried to the world.
This wasn’t lost on Osama bin Ladin. He not only took the lessons from Munich and the hostage crisis that followed the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, he was – as the events following 9/11 bear out – their most attentive and inventive student.
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