Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Women most terrifying of terrorists, author finds Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 17:03:26 EST Message-ID: \SE D;LIFE \HD Women most terrifying of terrorists, author finds \BY Betsy Pisik \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES On Aug. 29, 1969, TWA Flight 840 en route from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv was hijacked, evacuated and blown up. It was a daring operation that could have killed hundreds. The world was shocked - especially to learn that the untrembling hand on the grenade belonged to Leila Khalid, a young and beautiful Syrian woman who became the face of the Palestinian liberation group PFLP. Bombs are terrifying under any circumstance, but we are especially appalled when bombs are wielded by women. Women give life. They don't take it. It's this reasoning that allows a well-dressed IRA volunteer with a "baby bomb" to stroll through a London department store undisturbed. Or a North Korean actress-turned-terrorist to smuggle an explosives-laden cassette player aboard a Korean Air jetliner that fell in pieces - without survivors - into the Andaman Sea. Or a female member of Germany's Red Army Faction to shoot judges and businessmen at point-blank range. But female terrorists are nothing new. Women have been instrumental in some of the most shocking acts of bloodshed we've read about. And many we haven't. According to British free-lance journalist Eileen MacDonald, author of "Shoot the Women First" (Random House, $20), female terrorists can be more dangerous than their male colleagues. The title of the book is taken from instructions purportedly given to an armed anti-terrorism squad in Europe. "I found their commitment to be quite frightening. It's a jolt to interview someone who says quite calmly her intent is to kill," says Miss MacDonald, who spoke to scores of outlaw women in safe houses, jail cells and bars all over the world. The author, who lives in London, says that the research involved in getting to know her subject was chilling at times. "These are not the monsters everyone thinks they are," she says. "They are not deviates, and they are not 'the other,' and in many ways that can be disconcerting." When she started researching the book in 1988, Miss MacDonald worked from the conventional assumptions about female terrorists: that they were lesbians seeking revenge on the patriarchy, or gullible romantics who had followed their boyfriends into the movement, or deranged killers with long-simmering fixations on firearms and violence. The author says she was surprised to find that most of the women she interviewed were committed to their cause, rational in their planning, reasonably logical in their decisions and angry about the circumstances they felt had forced them into "direct action." "It was a shock for me," Miss MacDonald says. "I did expect one or two to be different [from the norm]." Although women have a hard time finding acceptance in many traditionally "male" fields, the fairer sex seems to be uniquely suited to many aspects of terrorism. Unsuspected and therefore undetected, women can be excellent couriers. Women also tend to be cooler under pressure and more given to action than talk. There is the need to "out-macho" the men. "Women have to be more to be equal," says Miss MacDonald, a slender and unstyled blonde in red jeans and a satin blouse. Balancing a cup of coffee on her knees in the Ritz-Carlton's seventh-floor sitting room on a brilliant autumn day, the 30ish writer explains that women also tend to join their movements later in life and grow into them rather than out of them. "They tend to be dismissive of the men in their groups," she says. The men are likely to lose their will and momentum by age 35, disheartened by the lack of progress or a term in jail; the women seem to think in hard terms, join late and grow in their commitment. "The German police say the women in their terrorist groups are the most practical. They've sorted out the safe houses, cooked and cleaned, plotted the action and then carried it out. The men like to talk about it." In Germany, where many of the revolutionary groups are at least 50 percent female, five of the eight "most wanteds" are likely to be women. Experts attribute this relatively isolated equality to Germany's aggressive feminism and its hyperviolent past. Research for "Shoot the Women First" took Eileen MacDonald, who also writes for a variety of British publications, around the world. She drank coffee with Miss Khalid in a Syrian encampment and sipped tea with members of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast. The women of the violent Basque separatist movement ETA received her and an interpreter in one of their favorite bars, while Kim Hyon Hui, the North Korean terrorist now prisoner of the South Korean government, met the author in a hotel especially cleared for the purpose. A half-dozen armed guards ringed the room and others hid in the bathroom for most of the daylong interview, Miss MacDonald says with a smile. Susanna Ronconi, a lynchpin of the infamous Red Brigades who was convicted of murdering three men and maiming a dozen more, was interviewed at her work-release job in a drug rehabilitation center. Astrid Proll, formerly of the Red Army Faction, was interviewed in the office of Hamburg magazine where, exonerated of assorted crimes, she now works as a picture editor. "I never felt I was in any danger," Miss MacDonald says. But she acknowledges feeling fearful in the company of the IRA. "I am, by birth, their enemy," she says. When she pointed out, in response to their dogma, that she was British, "They would say, 'Oh, we don't mean you, we mean the soldiers,' which is of course a lie. If someone had told them to shoot me they would have, without turning a hair." Miss MacDonald says the killing and the explosions do take a toll on all terrorists, eventually. "Although they start off perfectly sane in these groups, they suffer some sort of shell shock, much like soldiers do. And they justify [the killing]. They don't see themselves as murderers but as revolutionaries and heroes - and in the small groups they live in, they are." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. 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