Terrorism

One September morning in 1976, a bomb blew up a car as it was driving up Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. When police arrived at the scene, they found a human foot in the road, and a man lying on the pavement who was missing half his legs. Minutes later, he was dead. That man was ...read more

Feverish and delirious, Bob Stevens arrived at a Florida hospital in the early morning hours of October 2, 2001. The emergency room doctors thought the 62-year-old photojournalist might be suffering from meningitis. But when an infectious disease specialist looked at Stevens’ ...read more

I heard whooshing sounds… One of the most vivid pictures I have of the day is this waterfall of fire falling down. It was raining fire inside the elevator bank… I yelled ‘Stairs! Follow me!’ I turned right and just started running. —Neil Lucente, then-employee of Network Plus, ...read more

In October 2002, after Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater and trapped more than 800 people for 57 hours, it seemed like it couldn’t get much worse. Then Russian troops released a mysterious gas into the theater. The gas was intended to incapacitate the rebels—which it ...read more

On May 2, 2011, U.S. Special Forces raided an al-Qaeda compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed the world’s most wanted terrorist: Osama bin Laden. The entire operation, which lasted only 40 minutes from start to finish, was the culmination of years of calculated planning ...read more

During his adolescence in upstate New York, Timothy McVeigh developed an enthusiasm for guns and a suspicion of governmental authority. He drew inspiration from the 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, written by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce, which depicts a right-wing ...read more

The Unabomber is the nickname given to American domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who conducted a 17-year series of attacks, using mail bombs to target academics, business executives and others. The Unabomber bombing campaign – which killed three people and injured 23 – started ...read more

The Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was first founded in 1964 during a summit in Cairo, Egypt. The organization’s initial goals were to unite various Arab groups and create a liberated Palestine in Israel. Over time, the PLO has embraced a broader role, claiming to ...read more

When two home-grown terrorists detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, it was, at the time, the biggest terror attack in U.S. history. The event set off the nation’s most massive F.B.I. ...read more

On November 29, 1987, two North Korean spies boarded a South Korean plane in Baghdad. The pair had used fake names and forged passports to pose as Japanese tourists. They’d also convinced security to let them keep the batteries in their carry-on “radio,” which they’d turned on to ...read more

Palmyra is an ancient archaeological site located in modern-day Syria. Originally founded near a fertile natural oasis, it was established sometime during the third millennium B.C. as the settlement of Tadmor, and it became a leading city of the Near East and a major trading ...read more

The Patriot Act is legislation passed in 2001 to improve the abilities of U.S. law enforcement to detect and deter terrorism. The act’s official title is, “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” or ...read more

Few journalist-authors have spent as much of their careers chronicling and analyzing terrorism, al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks as Peter Bergen and Steve Coll. As consultants to the comprehensive six-hour film, “The Road to 9/11,” they helped guide the project’s exploration ...read more

In the annals of undercover law-enforcement, few assignments have been as tough—or impactful—as the one Emad Salem signed up for in the fall of 1991. Salem, an Egyptian native who served in his country’s military before immigrating to the United States in 1987, recognized the ...read more