Political Terror

From an early age, growing up during the Vietnam era in the Washington, D.C., metro area, the author was affected by the terrorism of the day. Friends, associates, and neighbors were impacted in one way or another. One neighbor was taken hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, years prior to the Iran hostage crisis and 9/11/01. In this volume, Patrick J. Pacalo puts to work the skills he learned as a student of political science and history; as a Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) intern; and as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve during Desert Storm. According to CIA analysis in 1981: "without indirect Soviet assistance many terrorist groups would find their operations severely hampered." There existed Soviet-directed terrorism and quasi-independent terrorist groups. This book represents information and analysis. The reader is free to reflect and decide if the winding down of some groups, while the Soviet state disintegrated, was coincidental.