Independent Perspective News

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

WASHINGTON — ATOMIZED cells. Leaderless revolutionaries. Soft targets. After Sept. 11, these were the dangers intelligence officials warned us about.

The sniper case amplifies them all. These days, it is increasingly difficult to figure out who is a terrorist — or what that even means. Terror — as opposed to terrorism — may be inflicted by any loner with a vague political grievance and a gun. John Allen Muhammad, the prime suspect in a string of killings around the Washington area, is the perfect enigma.

The police say he seems to have been driven by split motivations, a mix of ideology and rage. Mr. Muhammad, a Muslim convert, sympathized with Al Qaeda and was angry at America, acquaintances said, but he also had serious personal problems that may have set him off. In the end, one motive may have been much more mundane: money. The police say that a note left at a shooting scene included a demand for $10 million. "That doesn't make it easy to put him in a box," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. "We're uncomfortable classifying people who don't belong to terrorist groups as terrorists. But we're learning that the lines between terrorists, serial killers and psychopaths don't really exist anymore."

When the killings first began, government officials, including the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, played down the possibility of a terrorist link. But the federal government responded as if there was one. The Pentagon sent a spy plane. The C.I.A. lent its explosives-sniffing canine units. The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms committed a total of 800 employees to the investigation. Terrorist fears peaked when a witness, later found to be lying, said the shooter had olive skin.

"Imagine if this had happened before Sept. 11," said Neil Livingstone, chief executive of Global Options, a security firm based in Washington. "Would you have had this ongoing conversation about a terrorist on the loose? I doubt it." In intelligence speak, the sniper victims were soft targets. Mother, father, son, cab driver, bus driver, analyst. The victims were chosen at random; they were shot in front of a Home Depot, a park bench, a bus stop.

It took three weeks and 10 deaths to catch one man, possibly aided by a 17-year-old, armed with no more than a rifle and a fistful of bullets, in a part of the country with the highest concentration of police, military and counterterrorism forces. The hunt for the killer exposed what can and cannot be done to prevent terrorism. The government can fortify high-profile, so-called hard targets like the White House and the airports, but what can it do to protect a Ponderosa Steakhouse?

"Not much," said Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. anti-terrorism analyst. "There are certain vulnerabilities you can't prevent. It's like getting on a bus in Israel: you pay your money, you step on board, you take your chance."

In any case, police experts insist that combating terrorism requires different strategies. "It's a different battle," said John Timoney, a former Philadelphia police commissioner. "The best way to fight terrorism is to gather intelligence. The best way to stop a serial killer is to apprehend him."

But it's not easy to define terrorism. Terrorists have a cause. That's the most common way to think of it. But Dr. Hoffman said it is better to see cause, or ideology, as falling along a spectrum, with the archetypal serial killer on one end and archetypal terrorist on the other. Ted Bundy, who murdered brunette women for sport, is at one point along the spectrum. Further down would be Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who struck out at technology, and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who saw himself as the first hero of the second American revolution.

"The problem today is that there are more and more people who pick up ideas and go off on their own and do them," Dr. Hoffman said. "They are freelance killers."

Dr. Hoffman and others worry that the biggest fallout from the sniper attacks is a note of encouragement. No matter that Mr. Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, his alleged accomplice, were eventually arrested, actually sleeping alongside the road. The message survived. Leaderless revolutionaries, one-man armies, lone wolves angry at the world: you don't need a plane or a bomb to terrorize America. Just one gun.