New York bomb threats

I was going to begin by asking a question saying 'Is it ten or twenty years ago that people started hijacking planes?' and then I realised that there must be young people about to leave school, maybe already in college, who have never seen an airport which did not have its two familiar security devices, the doorway frame without a door through which you pass across a beam that identifies any metal you may be carrying and the scanner machine built over a moving belt on which all passengers must put their briefcases, handbags and parcels.

When this system was introduced shortly after the first American plane was forced on to Cuba at gunpoint, there was much belly-aching by regular air passengers and, I seem to recall, some now-forgotten patriot threatening to bring suit against the airlines for violating the first amendment to the constitution. The ground of his complaint was to be that these security devices, because they set up an arbitrary point beyond which friends and other non travelling well-wishers were forbidden to go, infringed the first amendment's guarantee of the right of freedom of assembly.

Well, nothing came of it, I presume because his lawyer told him about the case of Shenck versus United States 1919, in which a man named Shenck had been prosecuted for distributing pamphlets during the First War which urged young men to resist the draft, or the Conscription Act. The court's opinion was written by the majestic Yankee, Mr Justice Holmes, who invoked the power of the government to suspend laws, even the right of free speech, whenever there is a clear and present danger to the country. This danger had been cited to justify the wartime Espionage Act and Justice Holmes said it applied in this case.

Well, the offended airplane passenger was persuaded that he'd have a hard time convincing any court that the prospect of being blown to bits on an airplane by a man carrying a bomb or threatening the pilot with a gun did not constitute a clear and present danger to the passengers, and I don't believe anybody has ever sued an airline on this or a related ground.

So by now, we not only accept the security check as an obligation of air travel as automatic as showing your ticket, but by an odd paradox, the checking procedure guarantees the passenger a place and period of calm before he takes off. It used to be that the areas surround the embarkation gates were choked with friends and relations and, in New York and other polyglot cities, with whole families down to the third generation come to cheer or weep as some favourite son or Mum went off to visit Grandma or the new baby a thousand miles away.

Nowadays, these passionate pals wave goodbye as their beloved goes through the door-less door. On the other side is a long empty corridor leading to the spacious calm of the gate area. Unlike some of my friends who complain about the bustle and the boredom of airports, I enjoy them. I enjoy going anywhere, rather than coming back, and I seize any plausible pretext for meeting a friend.

I went out to Kennedy the other day to meet a friend coming in from London, a droll fellow who once said that he'd come to the time of life when all he looked forward to was to retire and go shopping. Well, I'd just finished a book I'd been working on all winter, I'd cleared out ten years of accumulated mail and newspaper cuttings and transformed my bedroom from a garbage dump into a neat and friendly study. To complete this process, I'd done something I never do, except on holiday – I'd gone shopping and now I was happy to give over half a day to meeting a friend at the airport. The Pope seemed definitely out of danger, which had been a daily anxiety, and I was in fine spirits.

My fine spirits lasted as long as the ride. As we came into the terminal of this particular line, we were waved down by two cops with guns in their back pockets. It was almost like entering Ulster. They peered at my face, they wanted to see the driver's licence, they asked our business and told us to ignore all the terminal entrances except one half a mile away. That, they said, is the only way you can get in.

As we passed a whole long wall of entrances, I noticed that they'd been pasted over with signs marked with arrows pointing to the one door that you could get in and this led to the lounge adjoining the Baggage Claim station which had two other cops at the door. There were no more, I should say, than 20 or 30 of us strolling around and waiting under the scrutiny of a covey of roving police and when, at last, my friend came looking rather dazed through the baggage door and we got off and drove again into the brilliant sunlight, it was a great relief.

Turned out that this had been the terminal where a bomb had gone off and killed a man the day before. In fact, Kennedy Airport, which handles more daily human traffic than all but three other airports in the world, the entire airport had been closed down, planes diverted, for five hours, all on account of an anonymous telephoned bomb threat.

Next day, there were more telephone calls and the whole working staffs were evacuated from such monster skyscrapers as the Chrysler Building and the World Trade Centre, which is the tallest building on earth. By nightfall, many other buildings, including the Manhattan Criminal Court and two department stores, had been evacuated.

This outrage involves notifying and evacuating in all about 100,000 office workers and visitors. It was to no avail. I should say happily to no avail, since there were no bombs. The following day, by four in the afternoon, the police had had 83 separate bomb threats, making a total of 268 in three days. They'd gone out to office buildings, to the Long Island railroad, the three city airports, to Pennsylvania, to Grand Central railroad stations and to six foreign consulates or United Nations' missions. They all want extra police protection but obviously the strain on the force of protecting buildings housing about 100,000 people is preposterous.

Now, New York city has a special anti-terrorist task force of 50 members made up of police and the FBI. The FBI, being federal, can only intervene in crimes whose suspects may have crossed a state border. This force, after a scary spring, had just about come to the conclusion that it had cracked and crushed the most active terrorist movement in the United States, which is a Puerto Rican group that almost always announces responsibility for its acts.

But this blitz of bomb threats – which is unprecedented in the city's history – is a mystery. The Puerto Rican terrorists claimed responsibility for the first but afterwards they stayed mum. Some officials think that all these calls could have come in from no more than two or three persons and the bitter truth is that if that's so, as the police commissioner said on Wednesday, 'A small cell is the most difficult to break. You have to get a lead and get lucky.' And the deputy head of the New York office of the FBI was even more glum, 'We simply don't know,' he said, 'this could be one guy, it may be 500.'

All this may make a lot of you feel thankful that you're not in New York, just as those of us who live outside Belfast cannot believe that people live and work there, get married, have babies and go out and take a walk. But from the police point of view, in matters like this, the curse of a big city is nothing but its bigness. I'm looking out on a tranquil scene in Central Park. Sunbathers are lying on towels in the meadow. The squeals of children can be heard from the playground, which is blanketed just now by the flowering horse chestnuts. You could walk, I suppose, 40 or 50 blocks and see only strollers and bustlers and shoppers and traffic and no desperate evacuees and hear no bombs.

If there had been no bombs, we could all bite our nails and wait awhile and relax, but two unexploded bombs were recovered at Kennedy the next day and four more since. A loud ticking clock was picked up in a wash-room that a telephone call had identified and the police switchboards are swamped with agitated calls from well-meaning people who think they saw, think they heard, heard tell of, could swear that an empty bag, a suitcase, standing in a wash-room, and so on and so on.

There are officials who believe that an assassination attempt on a world-famous person triggers a dangerous alert through terrorist groups and sends a shockwave through jails, psychiatric hospitals and the population of the unhinged. It's certainly a dreadful thought that the attempt on the life of President Reagan may have by a sort of contagion suggested the outrage of an attack on the Pope. What sort of contagion?

Well, there's a lady who thinks she knows. She is the police department's commissioner for public information and she says that the telephone calls are, I quote her, 'being precipitated by all the attention that the media are paying to the calls'. By the media, of course, she means the papers and the radio news round the clock and, most of all, television.

Now we've all heard, and some of us said over and over again, that it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of television reporting on most people alive. It's where they pick up their views of what's going on, their attitudes to other countries and, especially, their judgement of what is important and what is not, and that is decided by what television chooses to show.

Six weeks ago, our TV news started every night with horrid scenes of the slaughter from the left and the right in El Salvador. It was given this prominence, I suppose, because Secretary of State Haig was saying just then that El Salvador was the first country on the Soviet Union's hit list for dominating Central America. Then a couple of weeks ago, Bobby Sands led the news.

Well, this morning, you have to look on page 11 of the New York Times to read that the third hunger-striker has just died. And on another inside page, there is a piece, a sort of reminder, that there is in El Salvador, as the headline puts it, 'Still No Escape From the Horrors of War'.

Yesterday, the New York police department recorded 160 telephone bomb threats, all of which had to be investigated by police cars but, after a week of it, even this news has retreated to an inside page. Will this idiotic and criminal fashion simply wane? Or shall we come to expect that once we've gone up to the 32nd floor and settled in our offices, we may expect to be evacuated to the street as a routine of daily life? Nobody knows the answer or any solution to this clear and present danger.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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