had the intention to provide these weapons to terrorists. In 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency Director testified that while advanced and exotic weapons are increasingly

available, their employment is likely to remain minimal, as terrorist groups concentrate on peripheral technologies such as sophisticated conventional weapons.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my prepared statement. I would be happy to answer any questions at this time.

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50-803 98-3

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. Mr. Johnson.

Mr. JOHNSON. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee. And I particularly appreciate the opportunity to appear with the GAO. I think that the body of work over the last year is particularly impressive in this area, and I add my endorsement of Congressman Skelton's remarks in that regard.

I want to ask that my statement also be included in the record. I've provided a written statement and I'll dispense with reading it. What I'd like to do is jump to a very quick picture of the face of terrorism right now. I have felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. And let me emphasize, I'm not coming at this with any particular ax to grind. I've worked in the intelligence community. I've worked as a policymaker. I continue to provide some support to the Department of Defense in scripting exercises, but nothing I'm saying today is designed, in any way, to give me more work, or in anyway provide a financial advantage. In fact, if you take it-what I'm saying there is less terrorism and I think we're throwing too much money at it right now in an unwise way. I would be seen cutting my own throat financially if that was, in fact, the primary source of my income.

The bottom line for us, the good news, is that the United States has an extraordinary robust capability to combat terrorism. And one of the reasons I've always enjoyed working the issue of terrorism is that it is still one of the last remaining vestiges of bipartisan agreement. I don't care what your political views are, everyone can agree that terrorism is a bad thing and Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike have always cooperated in combating that threat. So, with that in mind, let me turn to these charts and just do a very quick presentation.

The statistics I'm going to show you were collected by the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Department of State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Some of these are published annually and have patterns of global terrorism, but the presentation today, a lot of the statistics you will see for the first time.

This chart shows you the picture of international terrorism going back over the last 30 years. We are right now approaching levels that we have not seen since the early 1970's. The zenith of international terrorist activity was in the mid-1980's. At the bottom of the screen you notice the red. That is domestic acts of terrorism. There is always a problem with collecting statistics about terrorism beginning with how you define it. As the Central Intelligence Agency has defined international terrorism, simply, it's an act where someone attacks a foreigner in their country or someone from a particular country goes to another country, and carries out an attack. Those get lumped in as international terrorists incidents.

There is a problem with this data that is consistent over time. Attacks in Algeria, against Algerians, don't show up in any of these statistics. Those are domestics incidents of terrorism in Algeria. The same for Pakistan, the same for India, the same for Egypt, and the same for Turkey. That said, I do recall having worked this issue in the mid-1980's, and when the acts were going up and we were showing the constant rise in the number of incidents, nobody was saying there was a problem with the statistics. It is only when

we've seen the decline that we have begun to see some intellectual gymnastics to explain, well, the incidents are down but casualties are getting worse. I have statistics later to show that that is not true.

The picture of these incidents as well can be seen by how many are anti-U.S. attacks. A substantial majority or substantial portion of the attacks in any given year are anti-United States. I'd like to point to 1991, is particularly noteworthy in terms of assessing the issue of threat.

Terrorism is a dynamic phenomena and can change quickly. We saw that during the Gulf war the number of attacks, total international attacks, as well as anti-United States attacks, dramatically increased. And there is a lesson. Policy actions of the United States can provoke retaliation.

There is good news buried in the rise in the number of attacks, however, because in that year most of them were low level. There were bombings of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. We did not have large casualty incidents because the countermeasures that were put in place did an effective job of preventing high casualty attacks at that time. When you look at the picture domestically, I have jokingly said that some officials who have made comments of domestic terrorism increasing were raised learning Arabic or Chinese because their reading from right to left. The facts are that the number of incidents both actual and prevented have declined over time. I give the primary credit for that to the FBI. The FBI has done a very effective job. I think one of the other key components that help contribute to this, is the fact that we are free. Freedom ends up being one of our best defenses against terrorism. It doesn't make us more vulnerable, in my view, it makes us stronger.

I would note that the 1997 results are preliminary figures because the FBI is only now releasing its report for 1996. But, I am told that 11 of those 13 incidents were letter or package bombs that were sent to the Al-Fayat Newspaper. None of those exploded. I think that illustrates in part that when you start stretching out to define an act of terrorism, is a letter that is delivered but did not explode, you have to accept the possibility of that threat but you should not exaggerate.

Another way to look at the level of international terrorist activity is by examining the regions of the world that are affected the most by international activity. And as you can see, the picture changes over time. I think the most interesting thing is to go against the conventional wisdom that the Middle East is the source of most international terrorism. That simply is not true. For the preliminary statistics for 1997, the State Department will issue its final report by the end of this month.

Colombia, Latin America, is the region right now with the greatest number of incidents of international terrorist attacks. And everything else plays a distant second. But you can also note that it changes, it is not static over time. And that reflects the fact that you can not pretend that terrorism is somehow going to disappear. That we can put away all of our capabilities. That we need to stick our head in the sand. I'm not advocating that. I'm not saying there is no threat. But I am saying that, I think sometimes we exaggerate the threat. In exaggerating the threat we end up scaring the

American people more than we do helping them recognize that the Federal Government is actually doing a pretty good job of protecting them.

When you look at the number and types of groups, the number of groups engaged in international terrorism have also been falling. And when you break them out by whether they are radical Marxists or Islamic Radical Fundamentalists, you also have some radical Jewish groups that once in a while show up, you'll notice that the vast majority of these groups remain radical Marxists though they continue to disappear. In fact, there was a fairly substantial fall off in 1991 as the Soviet Union was breaking up. The checkbook that the Soviets provided to countries like Cuba, Syria, and Iraq went empty. When the checkbooks went empty those groups no longer had a way to sustain themselves.

The other thing that I would note is that the number of Islamic Radical Fundamentalists groups, at least those engaged in international terrorism, are not dramatically increasing. Like the caveat that goes with mutual funds, this is no guarantee of future performance. This does not guarantee that you are always going to have the same set number of groups to deal with. But I do believe that the decline in groups coincides with a renewed vigor of U.S. policy that came in the wake of the Iran Contra scandal.

When the United States began getting its policy act together back in 1987 it had a measurable effect upon the incidents of international terrorism around the world. Another way to look at this is to say, of those groups who are engaged international terrorism, which ones are responsible for most of the attacks. Now this was a statistic, I must admit that when I was at the State Department we never generated. And when I got the data and began producing it, I was surprised by the fact that within any given year you're talking about 4 to 10 groups, maximum, who are responsible for 20 or more attacks. And from the standpoint of planning and using resources we don't have to worry about a universe of terrorists. We don't have to worry about a hoard. We are dealing with a very measurable, defined, discrete group. You'll see over time that there are some interesting similarities.

In 1996, as an example, when the data is classified there are some that are unknown and there is a group for others that are so insignificant as to not be measured. But, what is important in this statistic is, you notice, that in 1996 five groups alone_accounted for 51 percent of all international terrorists incidents. Two of those groups are based in Colombia, three of those groups are based in Turkey. And I would note that there it is no coincidence that Colombia and Turkey are major sources of drugs coming into the United States.

The lesson here, I believe, is that as State sponsorship has changed because of the effectiveness of U.S. policy and making it very costly for States to sponsor terrorism, you are seeing many of these groups now turn to drug trafficking as a way to finance their activities. I'm not talking narco-terrorism because the narcotics industry, generally, likes to avoid confrontation and make money. They are businesses. But we are seeing this phenomenon and it's not just in 1996. Again, we see it in 1997.

While the number of unknown and other groups fluctuates a few percentage points, once again, you see the National Liberation Army of Colombia, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, FARC, and the Kurdish Workers Party of Turkey. All three groups are engaged in narcotics trafficking. All three groups are engaged in committing acts of international terrorism.

I would also like you to note that groups that are traditionally identified as carrying out lots of terrorist attacks, at least in the mind of the public, Hezbollah, HAMAS, the Khmer Rouge, the AlGama 'Al-Islamlyya of Egypt, were responsible for a relatively small number of incidents. But, I will show a statistic later which explains why the public perception, and this deals with the issue of casualties.

When you look at the casualties for international terrorism over time, we have not reached the level of lethality experienced in 1987-1986, 1987. That timeframe was the highest body count of international terrorist. Now let me put it in another perspective. If you add up the total number of people that have died from international terrorism, since 1968, the number is less than 11,000. I don't want to minimize in any way the loss of life, but when you compare that to the loss of Americans who have died from the use of drugs-these statistics are from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy-100,000 Americans in the first 6 years of this decade alone. So, when you're talking about threat and loss of life, we're dealing with a great disparity in which the loss of life from drugs is substantially higher than the loss of lives from international terrorism.

At the same point, I do want you to take note of a couple of incidents, in 1995 and I think I have a graph that will show this a little clearer. The blue and the yellow refer to the blue are foreign casualties wounded from international terrorism; the yellow are U.S. casualties; the red are foreign fatalities from international terrorism; and the green are U.S. fatalities.

The two largest loss of life refer to U.S. citizens and acts of terrorism, international terrorism. In 1983, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut is still the highest loss of United States livesover 207. In 1988, the bombing of Pan Am 103. The two individuals responsible for that bombing remain in Libya. The Libyan Government continues not to cooperate. In 1993, the bombing of the World Trade Center. In 1996, the bombing of Dharan in Saudi Arabia. And this enormous peak that occurred in 1995 internationally, was the result of one incident in Japan. The Sarin gas attack on the subways by Aum-Shinryko.

The lesson from this is, I want you to put it into context, we're not facing a rising tide of fatalities or casualties around the world. International terrorism, fortunately, remains a relatively minor threat that is under control. But, governments have got it into that position by taking a proactive stance. So, I think the effort is not one of, let's stop what we are doing, but rather I think we are doing a good job, we can do better with what we are doing. And with a better focus of resources we can manage this problem. This is a manageable problem. I'd also like to show you the--this graph quickly provides an overview of U.S. casualties from terrorism. And again, you see a large number of wounded, over 900 in the bombing