“A Lot of People Watching”: Understanding the Theater of Terrorism^*

“In Renaissance religious paintings, angels and saints, lifted by faith, float above the ground,” said Brian Michael Jenkins in 2016. “Similarly, nuclear terrorism, lifted by fear, became gravity free.” Notable because of his position as a leading defense intellectual and respected within U.S. national security circles and internationally, Jenkins was used to speaking to official and public audiences alike about terrorism. His analogy to art in addressing a gathering of security experts was not just a passing rhetorical flourish. It was constitutive of the way Jenkins understood terrorism. By the time he made this comparison to Renaissance painting, Jenkins had spent more than fifty years trying to convince his audiences to see terrorism the way he did—as not just like art but itself a kind of art. In his view, counter-terrorists, in not understanding this, were enabling “media savvy terrorists” to play upon fears that had been “freed of evidence.” But it was worse than that. “Terrorists read what we write and listen to what we say,” said Jenkins. “Then they start talking about it. In turn, we listen to them, completing a feedback loop that confirms our own worst fears.”¹ Jenkins wanted counter-terrorism, as in viewing a pointillist painting, to perceive the scene with enough perspective to see more than individual dots, but rather to see the whole. And seeing the whole meant understanding the theater of terrorism.

Jenkins was the most important progenitor of what I call an aesthetic theory of terrorism that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory explained “international terrorism” as something novel in the world based on an altered relationship between a new actor, “the terrorist,” and his or her audiences, now potentially global. According to this theory, the conditions of the 1960s, a world of globalizing politics and media, and of breakdown in revolutionary theory and practice, created new possibilities and incentives for the enlistment of terrorism’s audience. “Terrorism is theater,” as Jenkins put it, and above all the terrorist wanted “a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening, not a lot of people dead.”²

The creators of this aesthetic theory of terrorism constructed “terrorists” as choreographers of violence who, while always possessing a political intention in the abstract, operated independently of political developments. The terrorists’ political subjectivities were displaced onto their penchant for theatricality, while the conflicts in which they were failed warriors dimmed from view. This conceptual apparatus helped to further extract terrorists from the contexts that would have earlier explained their behavior and instead embedded them within the global phenomenon of terrorism as theater. This theory of terrorism as aesthetic appeared effective in explaining the terrorism of the 1970s and continued to exert its influence in the 1980s and after as states built institutions, developed strategies, and deployed the figure of the counter-terrorist to thwart terrorism.

The construction of terrorism as aesthetic theater implied a feedback cycle in which what terrorism meant to terrorists was shaped by what audiences thought it was and how they responded to it. Understanding this cycle led Jenkins to admit that the policy relevance of his ideas sometimes undermined his proposals for how to combat terrorism. In other words, terrorism expertise and its influence on policymakers threatened to make terrorism more effective, precisely because of the terrorist’s need for the attention of these audiences. In a further irony, while the September 11 attacks appeared to some as the apotheosis of terrorism as art, it also represented the moment when military and security frameworks eclipsed aesthetic frameworks for comprehending terrorism.

Historian Beverly Gage writes that in response to the U.S. government’s “first feeble effort to develop a self-proclaimed national counterterrorism policy” in 1972, “a new generation of social scientists set out to apply the tools of sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science to meet the growing interest.” Among this new generation, Lisa Stampnitzky and others have argued, a cohort of experts emerged, many with backgrounds in counterinsurgency, who “invented ‘terrorism.’” The central dilemmas of this emerging field, according to Stampnitzky, revolved around how to define terrorism, terrorism’s rationality, and terrorism’s morality. The inability for terrorism expertise to become a “disciplined” field exacerbated its politicization and contributed to what Stampnitzky calls a “politics of anti-knowledge,” which others have linked to the prevalence of statist, settler-colonialist, and racialized frames for describing terrorism.³ While I find the story of terrorism expertise told by Gage, Stampnitzky, Melani McAlister, Julian Bourg, and others useful, scholars have overlooked why some terrorism experts chose to interpret terrorism as an aesthetic spectacle aimed at particular audiences and why this aesthetic theory of terrorism rose and fell in influence.⁴ The creation of this theory and its influence are surprising considering the field’s roots in counterinsurgency and the social scientific background of many of its experts. The subsequent decline in the theory’s influence is also puzzling since terrorism and counter-terrorism did not become less aestheticized and theatrical in the twenty-first century.

Jenkins’s diagnoses of the threats of the post-1960s give us a unique perspective on the changing relationship between national security and the social world of the era. They help us to see how the era’s revolutionary politics, avant-garde art, anti-imperialism, and consolidation of state power in the West in defeat of the radical left intersected with the rise of the figure of the “terrorist.” Further, the aesthetic theory of terrorism helps us to discern how terrorists and counter-terrorists, both dependent on overlapping audiences, became bound together. Put another way, they were co-creators of each other. To the degree that Jenkins articulated this relationship, he represented an exception in the field. In 2006, for example, Jenkins observed that when he started at RAND (Resarch ANd Development), “terrorism” did not “refer to a distinct mode of conflict.” This meaning would “be added” later “by the terrorists themselves and by analysts of terrorism.” And “in my view,” Jenkins continued, “the latter impart more coherence to the phenomenon than the former.”⁵ With this assertion, Jenkins displayed consciousness of his role in making terrorism a distinct, coherent, and actionable phenomenon. It would have been a small step from this insight to the more important one that the “terrorists themselves,” just like “terrorism,” were the creations of analysts such as himself. “Terrorists” played roles that the analysts projected, while analysts became relevant to the extent that they foresaw terrorism. They were therefore perpetually in the condition of, as Joseba Zulaika puts it, “waiting for terror,” and thus dependent on the terrorist.⁶

The aesthetic theory of terrorism, for all its limitations, captured a vital shift in the social world at the time of its genesis. The rise and fall of this theory of terrorism as primarily an aesthetic spectacle aimed at particular audiences reveals ironies and absurdities in the U.S. national security state’s efforts to combat terrorism. These ironies and absurdities, alongside the period style of behavior in contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism, show the relevance of aesthetics to any theory of terrorism in the twenty-first century.

The Theater of Terrorism

At a 1974 conference on terrorism, Jenkins presented a paper entitled “International Terrorism: A New Kind of Warfare.” Then a staff member at RAND in Santa Monica, California, Jenkins had established his voice in the nascent field of terrorism studies. He had published several papers on the topic and his work had drawn the attention of the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. He had interpreted “international terrorism” as something “new” that required a coordinated international response. But this paper, more than his previous work, captured what was distinct about Jenkins’s perspective. The “strength” of the “terrorists,” he said, “is judged not by their … violent accomplishments, but by the effect these have on their audience.” It was attention to the audience that distinguished terrorism as a form of violence. “Terrorism is theater,” Jenkins said in one of his aphorisms. It “is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims.”⁷

Having pursued a career in painting, Jenkins was prepared to understand violence in terms of aesthetics. So was J. Bowyer Bell, another node in the small network of terrorism experts that emerged in the late 1960s. Bell, who studied painting with artist Cy Twombly in Italy and socialized with transformational artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, remained a prolific painter and art critic throughout his career at Columbia University.⁸ That Bell’s artistic sensibilities and his methods of terrorism research mutually informed one another could be gathered from a posthumous exhibit of hundreds of his nearly 3000 paintings.⁹ Like Bell, Jenkins, who began his career at the Art Institute of Chicago at age seven, was immersed in the art world during a time when the avant-garde radically reimagined the relationships among the act of creation, the art object, and art’s audience, especially in pop art, Nouveau Réalisme, Gutai, Fluxus, happenings, and other performance art. Proximity to the theatrical style of behavior in the avant-garde art of the 1950s and 1960s likely made it easier for Jenkins and Bell to see theater in the terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Jenkins completed his studies at UCLA, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in painting at the age of nineteen. After UCLA, he continued painting at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico. Jenkins considered a future in art, but ultimately the military service requirements from an undergraduate scholarship directed him onto a different path: he became a Green Beret, serving tours of duty in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, for which he received two Bronze Stars and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He then returned to Southeast Asia between 1968 and 1971 as a civilian member of a U.S. Army special operations unit, the Long Range Planning Task Group, for which he received the Army’s highest award for civilian service.¹⁰ In these roles and at RAND his background in art shaped how he worked. Its influence could later be seen, for example, in Jenkins’s use of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch to represent the dynamic nature of al-Qa‘ida to the National Security Council (in contrast to more static depictions of seventeenth-century Dutch militias).¹¹ While some in the field would emphasize ideology, belief systems, and personality as terrorism’s driving forces, Jenkins’s insights into “the people watching” meant an emphasis on media, space, style, perspective, and audience expectations.

The core premises of the aesthetic theory of terrorism captured interrelated changes to the social world that were in ferment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The modernist conception of art as having a meaning independent of its audience was under radical challenge.¹² At the same time, traditional models of revolution, which sought to build toward a decisive encounter with state power, after failures to export the guerrilla foco from Cuba, tended to be replaced by urban guerrilla strategies that sought principally, in the words of Frederic Jameson, “to dramatize features of state power.”¹³ In the Global North, activist movements of the left fragmented, seen in the United States in the Black Power and Students for a Democratic Society movements, over the imperative of political violence in confrontation with the state.¹⁴ Television’s spread and instantaneity—enhanced by improved satellite technology—added to a perception, if not of a “global village,” then of a world in which spatial and temporal distance had shrunk.¹⁵

Jenkins’s first articulations of the aesthetic theory of terrorism developed from his explanation of the peculiar emergence of “urban guerrillas.”¹⁶ Urban guerrillas were different from rural guerrillas because of their access to audiences in metropolises, especially of the Global South. In considering how urban guerrillas might take control of a city, Jenkins identified five stages. In the “first stage,” which he called the “whole world is watching stage,” “urban guerrillas” selected targets for their “symbolic” value.¹⁷ Like nineteenth-century propagandists by deed, they expected audiences to grasp an act’s meaning in their experience of it. Attacks on banks, for example, would be read as an attack on “a symbol of … economic exploitation,” while strikes against “foreign firms” would be seen as strikes against “economic imperialism.” Living in Guatemala City while on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of San Carlos in the early 1960s, Jenkins directly experienced actions by the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR). He observed that “terrorists in Guatemala City exploded bombs at the embassies of the countries that had contributed troops to the Inter-American Peace Force.” The attacks “served no other purpose than to signal the opposition of the guerrillas to the intervention.”¹⁸ In other words, the act, when observed by the intended audiences, produced a political meaning, which the urban guerrillas sought to control.

Jenkins thought it unlikely that urban guerrilla movements would progress to control of cities. Instead, they would likely remain stuck in the whole world is watching stage, fixtures in newscasts, even as they failed to advance their armed struggles. The urban guerrilla’s condition was baked into structural changes in the international system, on one hand the apparatuses of international communication and transportation, televisual and electronic media, and commercial air travel, on the other hand the limitations of armed struggle as a method of regime overthrow in the Global South’s fortifying police states. Theatricality, therefore, would define urban guerrilla warfare. For the “urban guerrilla,” wrote Jenkins, “capturing headlines, or airplanes, or getting into an embassy,” would be “as important as capturing villages.”¹⁹

Given Jenkins’s premises, it was logical to make the aesthetics of theater a basis for explaining urban guerrilla warfare. Here we can see parallels between trends that art critics saw in the art world that Jenkins had inhabited and what Jenkins saw in the urban guerrilla. In his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” art critic Michael Fried observed the “theatrical” sensibility in the sculpture of Minimalist artists, exemplified in the work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, which Fried characterized as a “literalist” approach to art. The literalist, unlike the modernist, was “concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.”²⁰ As Fried saw it, Minimalist sculpture produced less an “object” than a “situation.”²¹ Another art critic, Jack Burnham, identified a paradigm shift in art to a “systems esthetic” which he saw as rooted in “technological shifts.” In a “systems-oriented culture,” argued Burnham, “only the didactic function of art continues to have meaning,” and the “artist operates as a quasi-political provocateur.” Burnham identified “happenings,” pioneered by artist Allen Kaprow, a kind of theater that took place in real (as opposed to staged) settings and assailed the viewer with sensations, as indicative of the “systems esthetic.”²² Whether in Fried’s reading of the Minimalists, or in Burnham’s reading of happenings, the production of a situation or an environment or a concept seemed to be more important to contemporary artists than the creation of a specific art object. Minimalists, Earth art, and eventually legions of other forms of post-modern art followed this seismic shift in thinking.²³

Both urban guerrilla warfare as Jenkins understood it and the avant-garde art of the 1960s as Fried and Burnham understood it accorded primacy to the event. Both relied on the beholders’ experiences to fulfill their meanings.²⁴ Both wanted to shock audiences with the unexpected, sometimes the obscene, as had Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain—an ordinary urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists in New York under a pseudonym. Both could involve the “subject” experiencing the situation as a participant. And “recent developments in news broadcasting—radio, television, and communications satellites” could amplify the effects of both art and urban guerrilla warfare.²⁵ Where the urban guerrilla and the post-modern artist diverged, though, was in the type of “situation” each produced. The urban guerrilla produced a situation distinguished by its violence and its attempted transparent political content.

Yet even this distinction could blur, since violence was not alien to the conception of avant-garde art. In his 1930 Second Manifesto of Surrealism, for example, André Breton wrote that Surrealism “expects nothing save from violence.” “The simplest Surrealist act,” Breton exclaimed, “consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” “Anyone,” wrote Breton, “who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.”²⁶ Theater director Antonin Artaud, who Breton expelled from Surrealist circles in the 1920s, developed a conception of the “theater of cruelty” during the 1930s and 1940s. The possibilities of “serious theater,” wrote Artaud, lay in “a resort to a mass spectacle” in order to “attack the spectator’s sensibility on all sides.” To achieve these effects, Artaud proposed “a revolving spectacle, which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outburst over the entire mass of the spectators.” Terror, Artaud believed, was fundamental to liberating within the public “the magical liberties of dreams.” He went so far as to write that “without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible.”²⁷ Artaud’s conceptualization, then, might be summarized by an inverted variation of Jenkins’s aphorism: theater is terrorism.

In the 1960s, the so-called Situationists articulated a more explicit link between violent political action and avant-garde art. Writing for the Situationist International in 1962, Guy Debord wrote of a “unified vision of art and politics,” in which it was the “role of avant-garde currents” to “publicize, elucidate, and develop” the “initial gestures of the forthcoming revolutionary era.” In his treatise, Debord highlighted acts “that have our total approval.” One was an attack by student revolutionaries in Venezuela on an exhibition of French art in which they “carried off five paintings, which they then offered to return in exchange for the release of political prisoners.” Debord added that “this is clearly an exemplary way to treat the art of the past, to bring it back into play in life and to reestablish priorities.”²⁸ Avant-garde art and revolutionary politics could thus converge and take identical form.

In her 1964 Cut Piece, Yoko Ono, often associated with Fluxus, carried scissors on stage and invited the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing. The Viennese Action Group (Wiener Aktionsgruppe) developed an aesthetic of ritualized terror aimed at exorcising the legacy of National Socialism through fear. In one characteristic performance, Herman Nitsch splayed nude against an upside down cross while his assistants brought in a slaughtered lamb, strung it up, disemboweled it, and poured the blood over him. On a scale typically only possible for governments and large corporations, Bulgarian and Moroccan artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created public spectacles, exemplified by their wrapped buildings and monuments in urban centers. The production of these spectacles could involve hundreds of participants, lengthy negotiations with governments, and millions of dollars of their own money. By confronting the unsuspecting audience in the theater of real events, they sought to alter social perception.²⁹ Experimentation with violence and public spectacle, then, flourished in the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s.³⁰

Some avant-garde artists saw radical possibilities in video art. Most notable among them was the Korean artist Nam June Paik, who introduced this form at a 1963 exhibition in West Germany entitled “Exposition of Music—Electronic Television,” consisting of television sculptures with which the audience interacted. Paik, who was called in the media alternately a “cultural terrorist,” the “TV Terror,” and the “John Cage of the ordinary domestic TV set” for his shocking performances, sought to create situations in which his audiences could experience television as a creative and interactive medium.³¹ “Television is the language,” Paik wrote, “that is perhaps the most widely spoken in the world.”³²

The performative antics of stagnant urban guerrillas became the foundation for Jenkins’s interpretation of “international terrorism.” If “urban guerrillas” had been conscious of distant audiences, “terrorists” were more so. “Terrorists may now be assured,” Jenkins wrote, that “their actions will receive almost instantaneous worldwide coverage” on television. This instantaneity meant that “terrorists” could affect far away audiences in real time, exploiting the breakdown of temporal boundaries between act and reception, and spatial boundaries between object and subject. For terrorists of the 1970s, “the world is now their stage.”³³ This instantaneity also enabled Jenkins’s object of examination—“international terrorism”—to be something “new” in the world, while terrorism as a tactic was as old as human history.

As an ordering methodology, Jenkins recorded each event of international terrorism on a 3-by-5 index card and stored the cards in a wooden box. The first entry, dated January 25, 1968, read: “Parcel bomb of anti-Castro group El Poder Cubano explodes in Miami.” The subsequent three entries annotated a kidnapping, an airline hijacking, and an embassy bombing.³⁴ Events in 1972 confirmed that Jenkins’s interpretation of this chronology had captured the moment.

The Lod airport massacre and subsequent Munich Olympics attack were unequivocally “international” in both design and execution. Organized by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Lod operation used members of the Japanese Red Army as perpetrators and many victims were Puerto Rican pilgrims, while the Black September Organization’s Munich operation was trans-continentally executed and affected a television audience of millions, now terrorism’s audience. As Jean Paul Sartre put it, “while tactically it did not advance their cause … we must in fact recognize that the Munich attack succeeded perfectly.” The operation, Sartre wrote, “put the Palestinian question before the whole world more tragically than at the UN,” and communicated “that this problem has become everyone’s.”³⁵ In this context, a memo from Jenkins, previously ignored, circulated at the U.S. State Department.³⁶ The crux of Jenkins’s message in the memo was that international terrorism, while a “new kind of warfare,” ought to be thought of as “theater.”³⁷ Soon after, he became a go-to analyst for U.S. officialdom, while his “chronology” became the foundation of RAND’s terrorism research, now staffed with a team of researchers and funded by the State Department and Pentagon.³⁸

The aesthetic interpretation of terrorism reverberated through the nascent field of terrorism studies. In her 1972 paper, “The Revolutionary Concept of Terrorism,” the academic Martha Crenshaw tried to establish terrorism as a distinct object of analysis. Of the four components of the concept Crenshaw identified, the third was that “there is a consistent pattern of symbolic or representative selection of the victims or objects of acts of terrorism.” In other words, terrorists communicated a political message through a symbolic medium, as Jenkins had observed. Crenshaw’s fourth element was that the terrorist “intends these actions to create a psychological effect on specific groups” which will “thereby … change their behavior and attitudes.”³⁹ Like Jenkins, therefore, Crenshaw understood the political effectiveness of terrorism to be rooted in the production of an emotional experience. But whereas Crenshaw hinted at terrorism’s aesthetic dimensions, Jenkins centered them. “Terrorism” was “about the people watching.”⁴⁰ The influence of these ideas among the “terrorism mafia” was apparent. Bowyer Bell captured the pith with his racialized quip: “‘Don’t shoot, Abdul! We’re not on prime time!,’” while academic Walter Laqueur called terrorists “the super-entertainers of our time.”⁴¹ Even mathematician-turned-expert Robert Kupperman affirmed in the media that “modern terrorism is theater.”⁴²

Terrorists “choreographed” attacks to ensure that they were “dramatic” and “deliberately shocking.”⁴³ “With apologies to Agatha Christie,” Jenkins said, “there’s no suspense to murder.”⁴⁴ As a storyline, though, hostages in captivity whose survival depended on demands being met made for suspense. It was common in the 1960s and 1970s for terrorist kidnappings to end in the safe release of the hostages, adding weight to Jenkins’s claims that terrorists were most concerned about their audiences. “The willingness and capability of the news media,” wrote Jenkins, “to report and broadcast dramatic incidents of violence throughout the world enhances and may encourage terrorism as an effective means of propaganda.”⁴⁵ Thus the modus operandi of the mass media aided terrorists in these effects. Jenkins believed that this dynamism produced a “trend” towards “more spectacular, more destructive acts” because the “public” was becoming “bored with what terrorists do now.”⁴⁶ Therefore, terrorists sought new means of capturing the audience’s attention.⁴⁷ Postmodern art became caught in a similar cycle as artists strove to find new configurations of the banal to produce aesthetic effects, repurposing ordinary objects as “art.”⁴⁸

For Jenkins, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) illustrated the difference between the “actual amount of violence” and the “greatly amplified effects of that violence” perpetrated by terrorists. Through the aesthetics of violence, especially in its kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the SLA created an image of itself as powerful. “There are two SLAs,” wrote Jenkins. “One has been on television almost nightly,” has a “seven-headed cobra symbol” that “everyone has seen,” has “tapes … listened to by millions,” and has “excited and entertained if not terrified the people of California.” At the same time, however, there is the “real SLA,” which never had more than “a dozen members,” and which had “to its credit” one “murder, one kidnapping, one bank job, and a few stolen cars—hardly a crime wave.” Additionally, the SLA exemplified how terrorists could achieve “broad objectives” of publicity, while simultaneously failing with objectives like ransom payments, release of prisoners, and political change.⁴⁹

Despite all the “international terrorism” out there, Jenkins chose a “domestic” example close to his home to illustrate his point. Jenkins’s choice emphasized the vulnerability of the United States as a stage for the theater of terrorism, particularly that performed by the radical left. But it also suggested the still malleable nature of the terrorist in this theater. Hearst was a nineteen-year-old with mundane interests living in a Berkeley townhouse, but within weeks of her kidnapping transformed into “Tania,” spraying bullets and giving orders in SLA operations in the name of a socially radical ideology. She instantly became a global celebrity, and she compared her metamorphosis to the development of a photograph.⁵⁰

The cumulative impact of this violent theater was substantial. “Look at the effects achieved by the terrorists,” wrote Jenkins, “the headlines captured, the amount of television time devoted to terrorism, the disruption caused by the alarm terrorists have created, the money spent on security, multiplied by all the countries in the world that have been compelled to take such measures.”⁵¹ “Terrorists,” through their performances, produced long-term effects on national and international society.

Here lay an important insight: terrorists were also among the “people watching.” As Jenkins later put it, “An attack in one place would overnight inspire a similar act in another part of the world.” Through theater international terrorism was becoming interconnected. “The Third World War had begun,” Jenkins said, “as a hundred little wars.”⁵² In the seventies, few of Jenkins’s patrons would have agreed that the “Third World War had begun.” Yet in time they would.

The payoff of the aesthetic theory of terrorism was a persuasive interpretation of where terrorism was (and was not) headed. The theory of terrorism and the people watching, for example, guided Jenkins’s understanding of the question: would “terrorists” use catastrophic weapons? He contended that the attraction for terrorists in “going nuclear” was not in causing “mass casualties,” but in “the fact that almost any terrorist action associated with the words ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ automatically generates fear in the mind of the public.”⁵³ The most likely threat posed by nuclear terrorists, wrote Jenkins, was the “creation of potentially alarming hoaxes” i.e. the use of pre-existent fears to heighten the effects of the next performance.⁵⁴ It was in imagining terrorists going nuclear that Jenkins formulated his aphorism: “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”⁵⁵ He saw more clearly than others that terrorism’s defining attribute was not the killing of “innocent civilians”; rather, it was the effort to stir the emotions of those watching—as spectators or, often, as participants. This insight helped Jenkins avoid accepting the nuclear terrorism scenarios that some peers concluded were a matter of “not if, but when.”⁵⁶

In the 1970s the aesthetic theory of terrorism established the “terrorist” as a consequential actor in world affairs and placed him or her within a global context in which these offshoots of the guerrilla tradition had become specialists in the theatrical. Further, the terrorists of the 1970s, as Jenkins put it, operated upon ideas that owed “as much to Marshall McLuhan” as they did to “Mao Tse-Tung.”⁵⁷ And in so doing, Jenkins believed, the terrorists had succeeded. “Historians almost certainly will label the 1970s the decade of the terrorist,” he wrote.⁵⁸ At the decade’s end, however, the “terrorist” of the aesthetic theory was at a crossroads. “Ironically,” Jenkins saw, “while extensive media coverage tends to magnify individual terrorist episodes, continuing coverage ultimately deflates their effect by making them commonplace.”⁵⁹ “We ought not to be too surprised,” Jenkins concluded, if terrorists “alter their targets or their tactics” to affect their audiences, which might produce more deadly terrorism.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, Jenkins remained convinced that the principle that terrorists wanted “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead” would maintain.

Creating the Terrorist

Jenkins and like-minded terrorism experts offered a compelling interpretation of the non-state actor violence disrupting international travel, sport, and diplomacy at a fortuitous moment. The U.S. government lacked a specialized way of deterring this ostensibly new violence, while the principles of U.S. Cold War strategy offered little instruction for how to mitigate it. After the Munich Olympics, sensing how such violence might make him appear weak, President Richard Nixon feared a scenario in which Palestinian militants kidnapped the Israeli ambassador and demanded the release of all Blacks from U.S. prisons. “What the Christ do we do?” he asked National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.⁶¹ The creation of the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism in September 1972 represented a mandate for answers. Familiar with Jenkins’s work, the government charged RAND with studying “international terrorism.”⁶² So the notecard filing system begun by Jenkins to record each act of international terrorism transformed into RAND’s “chronology” and became the world’s leading terrorism “database.” When Jenkins left RAND for Kroll Associates in 1989, his chronology had logged over 7,000 terrorist incidents.⁶³

RAND’s terrorism research diverged from the mathematical modeling scholars often associate with RAND during the Cold War while representing a link to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of RAND’s expert nuclear theorizing in the early Cold War.⁶⁴ It showed that the security expert’s quest for objectivity did not preclude the influence of artful interpretation or participation in expert theater. While a positivist project premised on the possibility of objectivity about terrorism that could inform policy, the database, developed by an artist with humanist inclinations, co-existed with the aesthetic theory of terrorism. As Jenkins would put it, each terrorist attack logged was “like a dot of color in a painting by Seurat.” “Stepping back,” he said, “I could see shapes and structure, then a composition.”⁶⁵ By the end of the 1970s, these dots added up to the figure of a decontextualized, racialized, and essentialized “terrorist.”

To retrace this process, we must keep in mind that the placement of each dot represented an interpretive problem. Just as important, each new act of international terrorism recorded had the potential to alter the narrative of international terrorism told by Jenkins and other experts. Jenkins’s aesthetic interpretation served to resolve these tensions between contingency and predictability and between data and narrative inherent in the chronology and its subsequent iterations as database.

What was the concept that guided data collection for the chronology? Jenkins and Janera Johnson described it in a 1975 report for the State Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): “International terrorism can be a single incident or a campaign of violence waged outside the presently accepted rules and procedures of international diplomacy and war. It is often designed to attract worldwide attention to the existence and cause of the terrorists and to inspire fear. Often the violence is carried out for effect. The actual victim or victims of terrorist attacks and the target audience may not be the same; the victims may be totally unrelated to the struggle.”⁶⁶

In accordance with the aesthetic theory, then, terrorism was defined here by the “quality of the act.”⁶⁷ Yet since virtually none of these elements was categorical, the analyst’s judgment determined whether an event counted as terrorism. Analysts like Jenkins, Crenshaw, Kupperman, Laqueur, Paul Wilkinson, and Bruce Hoffman would thus play an intermediary role in producing terrorism, not unlike the role that art critics and museums played in determining what was art.⁶⁸ And just as the art critic directed the attention of art’s audience to features of art it would otherwise have missed, the terrorism analyst directed the attention of terrorism’s audience to the meaning of the terrorist’s act that it might have missed. During the 1975 kidnapping of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil ministers in Vienna by commandos led by “Carlos,” Bowyer Bell pointed out, the “leader of the operation insisted that they stay in the headquarters building long enough for the television cameras to arrive.”⁶⁹ For Bell, the act was about publicity, not the operators’ purported causes.

In execution, RAND’s database reified the “terrorist” as a non-state actor.⁷⁰ This “terrorist” subscribed mostly to leftist ideology, sometimes in conjunction with ethno-nationalism. Among the “most active organizations” the longest list fell under “Palestinian,” but it also included the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the “Weatherman faction” of the Students for a Democratic Society in the United States, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the United Red Army in Japan, among others. The chronology’s “terrorist,” then, was a non-state actor opposed to the Cold War order whose operations tended to target the United States and Western Europe.⁷¹ These emphases were dissonant with Global South perspectives that saw international terrorism to be inextricable from anti-colonialism, decolonization, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.⁷²

Nothing in the aesthetic theory of terrorism, however, inherently limited its application to the violence of non-state actors. Indeed, state terrorism accorded well with the principles of this theory. But in the 1970s, security experts within the bureaucracy, as the state continued to suppress domestic radicalism, preferred to think of terrorism as mostly that of non-state actors. The RAND chronology, in line with the field generally, obliged. Jenkins and Johnson affirmed that “governments may also employ terrorism at home and abroad,” but the chronology excluded “incidents of state terrorism” because “such terrorism tends to be internal rather than international.” Jenkins would never take the position that U.S. agents, officials, or allies were incapable of being “terrorists” if they employed terrorist tactics. With incidents like My Lai fresh in collective memory, such a position would have been difficult to uphold. As he put it in a 1974 paper, “[we must] recognize the fact that soldiers—even our soldiers—may sometimes be terrorists.”⁷³ Yet the chronology implied that Americans and Western Europeans mostly played the role of terrorism’s victims.

As important, the creation of this figure of the terrorist pointed to something larger at work: the decontextualization of the “terrorist.” Analysis of “international terrorism” per se focused the lens outside any specific geography. The controlling metaphor was that of spilling over, often to societies in the Global North with little presumed connection to the “terrorist’s” starting point. West Germany as a site of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was emblematic. This spilling over metaphor lent the concept an arbitrariness: where terrorism occurred was at a remove from preexisting conflict. The political context from which the “international terrorist” emerged became less relevant to explaining his behavior. Internationalization, globalization of technology, communication, and transportation were emphasized; but these factors impacted the “international” in an almost uniform way, without local deviation. Such distancing differed from the counterinsurgency literature, in which the “terrorist” had been bounded by a specific conflict that all sides participated in.⁷⁴ The French wars in Indochina and Algeria might have shown terrorism to be the “principal weapon of modern warfare,” as French counterinsurgency theorist Roger Trinquier put it in 1961, but the terrorist used it in a particular context and once the war ended his work was presumed to be done.⁷⁵ The “international terrorist,” by contrast, could be more free-floating, independent of what had come before and with no logical endpoint to his vocation.

The “international terrorist” was best understood, the RAND chronology suggested, not in a local but in a global context, and best known not in a particular but in a universal setting. What had led a political movement to adopt terrorism was less important than how “terrorists” operated in general. This context obscured the terrorist’s political subjectivity and risked distorting power relations. A Middle Eastern terrorist in Europe exploited a distant society’s vulnerabilities. To the civilians he terrorized, he held the power. But the power relations in which his political movement existed receded from view. While Jenkins warned the U.S. Congress that the United States and international society could not “deal with [terrorists] apart from various local struggles,” his analyses suggested that to “deal with them” only within local struggles was insufficient.⁷⁶ Local struggles and specific causes mattered less to understanding terrorists’ behavior than a generalized understanding of how terrorists behaved.

Such criteria for “international terrorism” racialized the “terrorist.”⁷⁷ An event was “international terrorism,” Jenkins and Johnson wrote, when “terrorists went abroad to strike their targets, selected victims or targets that had connections with a foreign state, or created international incidents by attacking airline passengers, personnel and equipment.” In application, Palestinian militants exemplified this “new” phenomenon. Palestinian organizations “are the most truly international terrorists,” they wrote, “having struck targets in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Asia.” Since they produced obvious “international terrorism,” it was easy to conclude that Palestinians had invented the practice. After 1968, aerial hijacking, common in the U.S. experience during the 1960s and thought to be perpetrated mostly by the psychologically ill, became recast as “international terrorism” after the first hijacking perpetrated by Palestinian nationalists.⁷⁸ RAND’s database contributed to that recategorization. Thereafter, the Arab guerrilla (not yet presumed to be Muslim) became practically an empty signifier for the system of “international terrorism” as consumed by the U.S. government.⁷⁹ This picture of international terrorism risked congealing the contingent relations of the moment into universals.

Later, Jenkins observed with consternation the racialization of the terrorist as Muslim in U.S. popular culture. He portrayed it as a manifestation of the West’s deep-seated fears about Islam, writing “In our books and movies is the wild-eyed Muslim, rooted in 2,000 years of history: armies of Persia marching against democracy in Athens, Muslims killing Christian children in the Crusades, artwork of women in chains, sailors held by Barbary pirates. To the TV screen from the Middle East came images of hostages with guns to their heads, villains like Qaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein. Then Mahmud Abouhalima [sic.] and his gang of bombers; Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind and bearded sheik. Such images awaken deep-rooted fears.”⁸⁰ Jenkins, then, saw how the assumptions held by terrorism’s audience racialized these disparate actors and the trouble that created; yet he displayed little concern that experts in the “terrorism industry” had contributed to these perceptions.⁸¹

While RAND’s chronology of international terrorism was one way of creating the figure of the terrorist, RAND’s simulation of future terrorism was another. Jenkins excelled in this work, forecasting how urban guerrillas might seize a city, imagining how environmental terrorists might disrupt a nuclear plant, and conjuring a hostage standoff in a fake country called “Arcadia” to simulate “negotiations with terrorists holding hostages.”⁸² In these projections, Jenkins considered the intersections among popular culture, literature, and terrorism’s audience. In a 1988 study of threats to offshore oil drilling platforms, for example, Jenkins explained that since terrorists might take their cues from fiction and blockbuster film, scenarios depicted in those media ought to be guarded against.⁸³ Jenkins also considered whether literature offered useful solutions, claiming to have read “about 100” novels depicting terrorism to see “how novelists solve problems we analysts can’t.” His conclusion was that “so far they haven’t.”⁸⁴

In the same 1988 report, Jenkins considered the possibility of a plane being used in a suicide attack. He had first generated this idea in a 1983 television interview, telling the public that “what you could see for instance is hijacked planes trying to crash into major buildings” in the United States.⁸⁵ In a 1985 report on the “Future Course of International Terrorism” in which he posed the question: “How might terrorists respond to the new security measures aimed at protecting embassies against car bombs?” Jenkins answered that “Conceivably, they might resort to aerial suicide attacks, which are technically and physically more demanding.”⁸⁶ He raised this prospect again in testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1996, thereby repeatedly imagining the scenario later used in al-Qa‘ida’s “planes operation,” which while perhaps not indicating a “self-fulfilling prophecy” at least became a prophecy fulfilled.⁸⁷

Jenkins’s projections could save lives. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for example, in his work for Kroll Associates, he advocated for improved evacuation measures at the World Trade Center that saved countless lives on September 11, 2001.⁸⁸ But these projections also put Jenkins and his audiences in the position of “waiting for terror.”⁸⁹ And in an irony not lost on Jenkins, in sketching scenarios, he could potentially plant ideas in the minds of “terrorists.” Such was the dialectical relationship between “terrorists” and terrorism experts taking shape.

Through decontextualization, and through this synergy among data analysis, simulation, forecasting, art, popular culture, and mass media, the aesthetic theory of terrorism essentialized the terrorist. With the international terrorist removed from the contexts that before carried the brunt of explaining his behavior, he now operated freely within the context of terrorism as theater. He did so as a non-state actor ambiguously descended from revolutionary struggles vaguely connected to the Global South who acted globally but preferred symbolic targets from a handful of societies in the Global North and Israel—often depicted as the West.

Many would find political use in the essential terrorist. Appealing to his presence made it easier to articulate the tautology that “terrorists” perpetrated terrorism because they were “terrorists.”⁹⁰ Terrorism in turn became that which “terrorists” did. For some anti-terrorism crusaders, however, theater or not, what “terrorists” did was to deliberately kill civilians. Why? Because they were “terrorists.” This circular thought implied that “terrorists” today would be “terrorists” tomorrow. And eradicating terrorism, then, meant eradicating “terrorists,” rather than settling for the criminalization of particular tactics (like hijacking and political kidnapping), the favored approach adopted by Global North governments in the 1970s.⁹¹ The logic of the essential terrorist served propagandistic functions, not least for Israeli politicians who sought Western support in delegitimating Palestinian nationalism. Edward Said addressed this turn in his 1986 critique—entitled “the essential terrorist”—of Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-terrorism. Netanyahu had emerged as a vehement anti-terrorist through his founding of the Jonathan Institute, named after his brother, Yonatan, killed in the Israeli counter-terrorist operation at Entebbe. By 1984, Netanyahu served as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and frequently appeared in the U.S. media. As Said put it: “if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their terrorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on to attack them and their ‘terrorist’ states generally, and avoid all questions about your own behavior or about your share in their present fate.”⁹² Said suggested that a cadre of experts in the United States acted as “guns for hire” for this position, specializing in the television interview to disseminate their ideas, and racializing the “terrorist” in the Cold War’s twilight as Arab and Muslim. Netanyahu and the experts Said referred to were coming to embody the other protagonist in the theater of terrorism: the counter-terrorist.

Creating the Counter-Terrorist

According to the aesthetic theory of terrorism, the central figures in the theater of terrorism were the terrorist and his victims, while the people watching included governments and publics. Practically any kind of space—an airplane, an embassy, a public square—could act as a stage, with the mass media often serving as an intermediary between the event and audiences. The situations created by the terrorist made authorities susceptible to appearing incompetent, reactionary, or impotent. Unable to do away with the stage by suppressing the media, governments sought ways to play the role of hero. Here, a new figure emerged in the theater of terrorism: the counter-terrorist. The counter-terrorist’s arrival on the scene indicated the surprising policy consequences that the aesthetic theory of terrorism had helped to produce by the 1980s.

The counter-terrorist was embodied in three primary ways. The most literal was the commando of hostage rescue operations. Israel’s Sayeret Matkal exemplified this figure, most notably with the 1976 Entebbe operation in which commandos killed the terrorists (and dozens of Ugandan troops) while rescuing most hostages alive. Jenkins called Entebbe a “superb” example of “counterterrorist theater.”⁹³ What made Entebbe “doubly dramatic,” wrote Bowyer Bell, “was that the terrorists had not written in that role; they were as stunned as would be a theater audience if Hamlet refused to die or Macbeth won out in the last act.”⁹⁴ Upon this model, Western European governments and the United States trained forces for such operations. In 1977, West German commandos staged a similar operation in Mogadishu. U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s administration attempted Operation Eagle Claw during the hostage situation in Iran, which exemplified risks of dramatic failure.

The counter-terrorist was also embodied in the terrorism analyst who advised authorities and gave expert commentary in the media. This was Jenkins. He prepared audiences for future counter-terrorism. He urged policymakers to ready the armed forces, while in the media he advocated “upgrading the fight against terrorism.”⁹⁵ In 1979, Jenkins warned Carter’s National Security Council (NSC) about the “disturbing” disconnect between what “decision-makers” believed the military capable of and the “lack of U.S. capabilities for intervening with force” in a terrorist event.⁹⁶ Jenkins’s television appearances became so regular in the 1980s that one journalist referred to him as “television’s expert on terrorism.” He remarked with chagrined irony that in this role he was “only one step from showbiz.”⁹⁷

But the terrorism analyst as counter-terrorist could also play a role in resolving real-time terrorist events. This, too, was Jenkins. Indeed, the blurred lines that brought together analysis and counter-terrorism were implicit in the aesthetic theory of terrorism. In the 1970s and 80s, Jenkins aided numerous governments in crisis situations.⁹⁸ He advised the Italian government after the 1978 kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the 1981 kidnapping of General James Dozier, both by the Red Brigades.⁹⁹ Additionally, Jenkins developed relationships with quasi-governmental and non-governmental institutions as events made his expertise invaluable. Following the 1985 kidnapping of Father Lawrence Jenco in Lebanon, Jenkins became an advisor to Catholic Relief Services, and subsequently the Vatican, in efforts to obtain Jenco’s release. The Church of England enlisted Jenkins to help rescue Terry Waite, a hostage negotiator kidnapped in Lebanon and held in captivity until 1991.¹⁰⁰ As international terrorism became salient, then, Jenkins became practically a counter-terrorism ambassador, especially in Western Europe, who could apply his expertise to real-time situations.

A third embodiment of the counter-terrorist was the politician who publicly staked his political fortunes on terrorism. U.S. Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) exemplified this positionality in the late 1970s. Netanyahu launched his political career with counter-terrorism and fortuitously for him served as an Israeli official in Washington when U.S. President Ronald Reagan had proclaimed combatting terrorism to be a principal foreign policy aim.

By the early 1980s, counter-terrorists and their ideas were shaping international events, wars, and interventions. In Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the government claimed to be extirpating “terrorists” in West Beirut, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was headquartered. Israel’s Operation Peace for Galilee showed how counter-terrorism could entail military intervention and occupation. The invasion’s spark was ostensibly the attempted murder of Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Argov by anti-PLO Palestinian militants in London. Journalist Robert Fisk observed, “How a ceasefire in southern Lebanon could apply to the streets of Kensington—which are a very long way from the Middle East—was never explained.”¹⁰¹ Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin used the associations of Palestinian nationalism with the figure of the terrorist to imply that the invasion stemmed from what happened in London. Spelled out, the logic was this: Palestinians perpetrating terrorism must be directed by the PLO, an organization the Israeli government considered “terrorist,” even when they were the professed enemies of the PLO. Such logic had its critics, but the Reagan administration mostly accepted it.¹⁰²

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon impacted U.S. counter-terrorism, not least because it led directly to the 1982–84 U.S. Marine mission to Lebanon as part of a multinational force. After the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and of Marine headquarters there that October, Jenkins observed that while the U.S. task had been “combatting” terrorism, on October 23, 1983, “it became war” against terrorism.¹⁰³ He became an oracle of this new kind of war—what it was, who it was against, and how it would be fought. The lines blurred further between his roles as disinterested scholar and as interested practitioner, between impartial analysis and counter-terrorism.

Jenkins mapped out militarized retaliation for terrorism. In testimony before the Long Commission investigating the Beirut bombings for the Pentagon, named for its chair, Admiral Robert L.J. Long, Jenkins presented a typology of militarized counter-terrorism including “lateral attacks” and “full-scale military operations.” The former, wrote Jenkins, would include attacks on terrorist “strongholds … whether or not their activities were related to the specific terrorist attack that provoked the retaliation.” Here was the logic behind subsequent U.S. military strikes against Libya and Iraq. “In a lateral attack,” Jenkins said, “one views international terrorism as a single adversary culpable in a general way for any specific terrorist attack. A lateral attack is, therefore, a counterblow to terrorism in general.”¹⁰⁴ To know what could be attacked laterally, then, one had to understand “terrorism in general,” as Jenkins’s theory did.

Yet though it was founded on his ideas and justified his expertise, the “war against terrorism” represented a deviation from Jenkins’s earlier ideas. What “terrorists” crave more than anything, Jenkins believed, was attention. “It troubles me,” he told the Senate in 1978, “to see terrorism so visibly institutionalized at high levels of government. Terrorists seek this kind of attention. And they ought not to receive it.”¹⁰⁵ Aside from how such attention bolstered “terrorist” ambitions, it also represented political risk. Any war against the “terrorists,” Jenkins insisted, would be long and politicians would struggle to persuasively claim victory. Jenkins’s success at drawing the attention of terrorism’s audience to terrorism ironically undermined the efficacy of his proposals.

The Reagan administration took little heed of recommended caution about giving attention to terrorists. Reagan’s public attention to terrorism reflected the influence of new experts, like journalist Claire Sterling, author of The Terror Network, and those participating in Netanyahu’s 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism.¹⁰⁶ More important to Reagan than attention terrorists might receive was the project of raising support for the assertion of U.S. military power, especially in Latin America and the Middle East.¹⁰⁷

Whereas in the 1970s, the U.S. government invoked the figure of the terrorist mostly to delegitimize domestic radicalism, in the 1980s it more often called upon the figure of the terrorist to mobilize support for the use of U.S. military power abroad. This shift coincided with a convergent shift in terrorism expertise from a focus on non-state international terrorism to so-called state sponsorship of terrorism. As Jenkins had expected, this rhetoric had the effect of heightening pressure on the administration to act.

Uncoincidentally, the Reagan administration issued a new counter-terrorism directive when the Marines withdrew from Lebanon in March 1984. In Jenkins’s words, National Security Decision Directive 138 represented “a declaration of war against an unspecified terrorist foe, to be fought at an unknown place and time with weapons yet to be chosen.”¹⁰⁸ Terrorists somewhere would pay, publicly, for the Beirut bombings.

U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz became the Reagan administration’s most voluble counter-terrorist politician. In his 1984 address, “Terrorism and the Modern World,” he asserted that “the knowledge we have accumulated about terrorism over the years can provide the basis for a coherent strategy to deal with the phenomenon, if we have the will to turn our understanding into action.”¹⁰⁹ So he enlisted the previous decade’s expertise as a call to action. Jenkins played a symbolic role, chairing a summit of specialists Shultz organized aimed at refuting myths that Shultz believed sapped vigorous action.¹¹⁰ Terrorism expertise proved three things, Shultz told his audiences: terrorism was war; terrorism was a strategy uniting U.S. enemies; and wherever terrorism occurred, it was “directed against us.”¹¹¹ The only answer, Shultz argued, was to retaliate.

Just as the theater of terrorism had been imagined as global in the 1970s, Reagan imagined the war against terrorism as global in the 1980s. The enemies the administration identified first centered around Moscow, itself a shift from earlier U.S. associations of terrorism with Palestinian guerrillas, leftist armed groups, and domestic radicals. Jenkins thought the Reagan administration’s perception of the Soviet Union as the font of terrorism counterproductive, arguing that it “may diminish our opportunities to do something effective to combat terrorism.”¹¹² Especially after 1983, however, the administration conjured a more diffuse enemy, with Iranian and Syrian backed Shi‘i militants, Palestinian guerrillas, Libyan dictator Muamar Qaddafi, the Fidel Castro government in Cuba, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and Kim il Sung’s North Korea—what Reagan called a “new, international version of Murder, Incorporated.”¹¹³ Reagan attached the threat of terrorism to a swath of enemy states across the Global South, flattening distinctions among them. We can see U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2002 “Axis of Evil” pronouncement as a reverberation of this formulation.

When Shi‘i militants associated with Hizbullah hijacked TWA 847 to Beirut in 1985 and held the hostages for weeks, the spectacle appeared to summon the figure of the counter-terrorist to action. Yet Reagan could only express frustration, confessing that he had “pounded a few walls” about the situation. The administration relied on Syria, officially considered a “state sponsor of terrorism,” for the hostages’ release, and contorted itself to claim that it had not “made concessions” to terrorists during the event.¹¹⁴ Once the hostages had been released (one had been murdered), as if to offset the humiliation, Reagan invoked the “spirit of Rambo” saying the film gave him ideas for what to do “next time.”¹¹⁵ In the film, Rambo single-handedly kills hundreds of anonymous Vietnamese and Soviet captors to rescue M.I.A. captives. Transposing the fantasy onto the Middle East, The Delta Force, under production during the crisis and released the following year, followed an identical hijacking situation.¹¹⁶ This time, however, Delta Force, led by Chuck Norris’s character, flamboyantly kills the terrorists and rescues the passengers (and the plane).

Following the TWA 847 affair, Reagan gave Lt. Col. Oliver North, an NSC staff-member, latitude to orchestrate the White House’s response. As a counter-terrorist, North had a flare for the theatrical. After the 1985 killing of American Leon Klinghoffer aboard the hijacked Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front, for example, North helped organize a dramatic operation. The White House used U.S. Navy F-111’s to divert an Egyptian airliner carrying the hijackers to a NATO base in Italy. Italian forces prevented U.S. forces from apprehending the suspects and the government refused to extradite them, but North remembered the affair as “one of the most successful” efforts to “engineer an effective resolution to an ongoing event” of Reagan’s presidency.¹¹⁷

Jenkins’s analyses, however, implied that counter-terrorists like North, who confused dramatic spectacle with success, misunderstood the war against terrorism. Jenkins believed that the “handling of the aftermath” had “been terrible.” As he put it, “We humiliated a friend (Egypt). We bashed an ally (Italy). We snatched diplomatic disaster from the jaws of rare victory against terrorists.” To make matters worse, “we remain … mistaken in the belief that by applying bold military force and bullying reluctant governments to action, we can defeat terrorism.”¹¹⁸ Jenkins warned that it was “far more likely that the war against terrorism will be a protracted contest, perhaps one without end,” and “like it or not, we are in it for the duration.”¹¹⁹ Before anyone had heard of al-Qa‘ida, therefore, the “forever war” was a fait accompli.

The Reagan administration’s war against terrorism intensified feedback loops of the theater of terrorism. In perceiving the United States as terrorism’s victim and as the fulcrum of counter-terrorism, politicians helped to make this so. Terrorist attacks confirmed U.S. vulnerability and could be seen as evidence of a broader strategy, directed by enemy states in the Global South, in turn provoking punitive responses. An escalating devotion of resources to counter-terrorism, mandated by the 1986 Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, fed a tendency to see threats in a recurring cycle.

In an ironic twist, the “war against terrorism” followed the same aesthetic principles as terrorism. Despite Reagan’s stated intent, the United States retaliated militarily for just two of the over 600 terrorist incidents involving Americans catalogued during his presidency.¹²⁰ The administration was thus desperate to make itself appear to be acting more forcefully than it was, and to do this, as Jonas Staal later put it, “artistic tools” were “a crucial part of the arsenal.”¹²¹ As Jenkins foresaw, the “war” would be waged through dramatic spectacles designed to affect various audiences. For the U.S. government, these audiences would include “terrorists,” states supporting them, allied governments, and publics at home and abroad. In other words, counter-terrorism understood as war, both metaphorical and real, had properties of terrorism itself—violence or the threat of violence to produce effects in audiences beyond those directly targeted. Theater was as much the character of counter-terrorism as it was of terrorism. Whether through diverting the Achille Lauro hijackers in mid-flight, bombing Libya in Operation El Dorado Canyon timed for the nightly news, or rendering Fawaz Younis from Cyprus in 1987, U.S. counter-terrorists jostled with terrorists to shape perceptions of global audiences through the deployment of aestheticized violence in an evolving domain of warfare.

With the Iran Contra scandal, the Cold War’s end, and an apparent decline in anti-American terrorism between 1989 and 1993, the war against terrorism flickered. Some experts at the time wondered: “must the show go on?”¹²² Yet the United States’ “unipolar moment” brought new opportunities to instrumentalize terrorism expertise. In 1989, Jenkins left RAND for a position as Senior Managing Director at Kroll Associates, a Manhattan-based private investigation firm. “I’m moving on to a different sort of villain,” Jenkins put it at the time.¹²³ His tenure at Kroll coincided with the firm’s many high-profile cases including tracking the financial subterfuge of dictators Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, and Saddam Hussein. Unlike at RAND, though, Jenkins’s work at Kroll was confidential. Whatever discoveries were made and whatever knowledge was applied was done solely in the interest of private patrons. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, CEO Jules Kroll told Jenkins that many of the people there were his clients. Jenkins quipped back that many of the people there were also his “subjects.”¹²⁴ That indicated how Jenkins’s audiences and the objects of his analysis had transformed.

While at Kroll, however, Jenkins remained a select interpreter of terrorism for the national security state. Demand for his interpretation grew after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in Tokyo, and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, all of which suggested to experts a new “new terrorism.” Jenkins joined seminars with National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to discuss this threat and testified to Congress.¹²⁵ And when U.S. President Bill Clinton authorized a commission on aviation security following the 1996 crash of TWA 800 off Manhattan, he appointed Jenkins to it.¹²⁶ In 1998, Jenkins returned to RAND as a “senior advisor to the President at RAND Corporation,” who called Jenkins’s return “nothing if not timely,” since it coincided with al-Qa‘ida’s suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.¹²⁷

It was prominent artists, not terrorism experts, who made the point that 9/11 showed the aesthetic power of terrorism. As the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen put it, the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” The terrorists had achieved “something in one act” that musicians “couldn’t even dream of,” in which “people practice like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for a concert, and then die.” Yet it was precisely at this moment that the expression of such an idea became taboo, as evidenced by the scandal that Stockhausen’s remarks aroused.¹²⁸ Nevertheless, other prominent artists, such as the author Jonathan Franzen and painter Damien Hirst, expressed similar ideas. Franzen, for example, wrote that he was “absolutely sure” that the “death artists who planned the attack were rejoicing over the terrible beauty of the towers’ collapse.”¹²⁹ These artists suggested that terrorism had surpassed art in aesthetic power.

Ironically, this acknowledgement came as the “new terrorism” appeared to render the aesthetic theory of terrorism obsolete, or at least in need of revision. For as much as 9/11 could be read as a fulfillment of terrorism analysts’ ominous projections, it also rumbled the terrorism field. As Hoffman put it in his 2006 edition of Inside Terrorism, “On that day the long-standing suppositions that terrorists were more interested in publicity than in killing” were “swept aside in a deafening crescendo of death and destruction.”¹³⁰ What now of Jenkins’s quip that terrorists “wanted a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead”? Hoffman’s statement suggested that 9/11 proved Jenkins’s theory of terrorism incompatible with the new era. At the least, in the twenty-first century, Jenkins’s formula ought to be revised: terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead, if more dead meant more watching. As it committed itself to permanent military and security strategies for the global war on terror, the U.S. security state gave no indication that it had use for the idea that terrorism was theater.

And yet, in action the global war on terror showed that counter-terrorism was (deadly) theater. As the Bush administration expanded the war on terror into new “theaters of operations,” the violence appeared to be more about the people watching than the actual victims, of which there were many.¹³¹ In absurdist fashion, the United States actively created terrorists in order to pursue counter-terrorism against them. In February 2003, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell elevated the unknown Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi to international renown in order to bolster the administration’s case for war in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi capitalized on that attention thereafter, surpassing Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as the most sadistic villain in the theater of terrorism. When U.S. forces finally assassinated al-Zarqawi in 2006, Bush made the announcement from the White House, performing one of the core rituals of the global war on terror.

In the context of the global war on terror, terrorism, too, became more theatrical. Al-Zarqawi’s sadism, for example, was exemplified in his role as executioner of Western captives in Iraq in videos released to the media and on the internet. Journalist Jason Burke wrote that while this “genre” had existed for decades, with the U.S. occupation, “terrorist film-makers have started to reach a mass audience.” He observed that “turning off the TV is no answer. Refusing to broadcast the video doesn’t make any difference. The videos exist. We feel compelled to watch them even when we’d rather not. We are in the unwilling audience.”¹³²  The whole world is watching.

It was perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of the value of the aesthetic theory of terrorism when, with insurgency enveloping U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some U.S. military planners sought lessons in realist art of the past. Beginning in September 2003, the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers to learn the nature of the war on terror. The film became a fixture of professional military education. The Battle of Algiers depicted how in an urban counterinsurgency campaign, capturing or killing terrorists was insufficient for victory.¹³³ The lessons of this film, ironically, became relearned as the lessons of the Iraq war.

The revival of counterinsurgency doctrine was a belated acknowledgment that the war against terrorism had always been about the people watching. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by General David Petraeus, emphasized the importance of “narrative,” the “central mechanism through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed,” for both insurgents and counter-insurgents. “Stories,” proclaimed the manual, “are often the basis for strategies and actions, as well as for interpreting others’ intentions.”¹³⁴ Nevertheless, the United States failed to tell a convincing “story” about Iraq or the other theaters in the war on terror. With “legitimacy” out of reach, decision-makers sought to awe the people watching with ritualized spectacles of U.S. forces assassinating the world’s leading terrorists under the presidential gaze.

As the ironies of the aesthetic theory of terrorism’s fall suggested, the theory could be a valuable tool in diagnosing the problems of the twenty-first-century world. Jenkins continued his vocation at RAND, now part of what Joseph Masco called “a new competitive terrain across corporate, academic, military, intelligence, and scientific institutions for threat identification, anticipation, and response.”¹³⁵ Amidst the global pandemic’s ravages and the protests for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd, Jenkins saw signs of historical recurrence. “The conditions facing the United States today are reminiscent of those that gave rise to the radicalism of the 1970s,” Jenkins wrote, “and could once again lead to political violence, including terrorism.”¹³⁶ The theater of terrorism, in other words, would continue.

Author Biography

Alex Hobson is a post-doctoral research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, United States. His book manuscript, “Chains of Vengeance, The United States, the Middle East, and Wars of Terrorism, 1967-2021” examines the development of an ethics of vengeance in U.S.-Middle East imperial history since the 1960s. He received his PhD in international history at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, United States) and has taught at Northwestern, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL, United States), Drake University (Des Moines, IA, United States), and Boston University (Boston, MA, United States). His writings have appeared in International History Review and Foreign Policy.

Footnotes