New Year's Evil?

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The terror of terrorism is what you don't know. You can listen all you want to warnings to be vigilant. Cops can scan crowds; dogs can sniff luggage; border crossings can be tightened; you can report parcels left unattended. But if--when--it comes, you won't be warned. "We're not confident we can stop it," admits an Administration official.

Nonetheless, the Clinton team is determined to try. It lives in dread of an NSSE--the Disneyesque abbreviation for a national-security special event that triggers special precautions. But with Y2K happening all across the world, a flood of threats has washed in from every corner of the globe, and suspicious characters have been arrested. There's no shortage of danger out there. The government has conducted drills in 27 cities for an NSSE, but the real strategy is "Raise your defenses and plan for the aftermath." So when the Administration's heavy hitters convened in the basement of the White House Monday afternoon to hash over a subject so sensitive that few of their top aides were allowed in, they had a surfeit of possibilities to worry about but precious little that was concrete and even less they could do.

What got the government on edge also seeped through to the public. The State Department issued two warnings about possible overseas attacks. The FBI chipped in with an alert for mail bombs, further raising the temperature. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on Thursday found that 62% of citizens surveyed believe terrorism is likely by New Year's Eve. Yet at the same time, official after official trotted out with reassuring words to soothe the jitters. "The authorities are on a higher level of alert," said President Clinton, the nation's Calmer in Chief, but ordinary people ought to go ahead and party.

The President is the man who will ultimately bear the blame if something happens. But his top aides came away from their Monday confab with more questions than answers. They've developed a bad case of nerves since a suspicious Algerian was arrested at the Washington State-Canada border two weeks ago. But they have uncovered no mother lode of hard information about his plans. "You don't know what's true," says a senior intelligence official. "But the political price of making a mistake in judging is so high." Is the chief threat lurking abroad or at home? Is Osama bin Laden masterminding a spectacular millennial blast, or would something come from an unknown, homegrown wacko?

Terrorism has undergone a sea change since the old days of skyjackings and hostage taking. Back then, the who and the why were known: leftists like the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang, nationalists like the I.R.A., the P.L.O. and the Kurdish Workers' Party, and state sponsors like Syria and Iran, all with rational political objectives. In an odd way, the older forms of state-sponsored terror were easier to manage. They were tactical ploys with built-in limits to the damage that could be inflicted if the groups hoped to win hearts and minds to their causes--and the perpetrators left an address for retaliation.