Kryachkov 2!indd

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Д. А. Крячков
UNIT VII
helped the Palestinian cause, even though as late as June 2003 only about one-third of all Palestin-
ians thought Yasser Arafat was doing a good job.
The key to terrorist recruitment, obviously, is the group that does the recruitment. Jerrold Post 
interviewed for eight hours an Abu Nidal terrorist named Omar Rezaq, who skyjacked an airliner 
and killed five passengers before an Egyptian rescue team captured him. The interviews sought to 
test the defense counsel’s claim that Rezaq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and so did 
not appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions. Post found no such disease.
He met instead a thoroughly calm, professional man, who, after a happy childhood devoid of 
poverty, had moved with his mother to a refugee camp following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. At 
school he encountered a radical Palestinian teacher (and PLO member) who imbued him with a 
hatred of Israel and helped him join a camp where, at age 12, he began receiving military training. 
Rezaq spoke to Professor Post in a calm, orderly, unemotional way. He thought of himself as a 
soldier and of the people he shot as enemies. He realized that his actions were crimes — that was 
why he wore a ski mask — but he did not think they were wrong: he was, after all, fighting Zion-
ism. The notion that he was mentally ill was absurd: Abu Nidal, a highly professional group, would 
have long since weeded him out. Abu Nidal had killed or injured many people in massacres at the 
Rome and Vienna airports and gravely wounded the Israeli ambassador to Great Britain: you do 
not accomplish these things by relying on psychotics.
While some suicide bombers have been the victims of blackmail, and some have been led to 
believe, wrongly, that the bombs in their trucks would go off after they had left them, my sense 
is that most recruitment today relies on small-group pressure and authoritative leaders. Anyone 
who took social-science courses in college will surely remember the famous experiments by Stan-
ley Milgram. In the 1960s, Milgram, then a professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through a 
newspaper ad offering them money to help in a project purporting to improve human memory. 
The improvement was to come from punishing a man who seemed unable to remember words 
read aloud to him. The man, a confederate of Milgram’s, was strapped in a chair with an electrode 
attached to his wrist. The punishment took the form of electric shocks administered by the experi-
mental subjects from a control panel, showing a scale of shocks, from 15 to 450 volts. At the high 
end of the scale, clearly marked labels warned: “Danger — Severe Shock.” As the subject increased 
the imaginary voltage, the man who was supposed to have his memory improved screamed in 
pretended pain.
About two-thirds of the subjects Milgram had recruited went all the way to 450 volts. Only two 
things made a difference: the absence of a clear authority figure and the presence of rebellious 
peers. Without these modifications, almost everybody decided to “follow orders.” This study sug-
gests to me that, rightly managed, a cohesive group with an authoritative leader can find people 
who will do almost anything.
Terrorist cells understand these rules. They expose members to unchallenged authority figures 
and quickly weed out anyone who might be rebellious. They get rid of doubts by getting rid of 
the doubters.
This is not very different from how the military maintains morale under desperate conditions. 
Soldiers fight because their buddies fight. Heroism usually derives not from some deep heroic 
“urge” or from thoughts of Mom, apple pie, and national ideology, but from the example of others 
who are fighting.
Milgram did not train terrorists; he showed that the instinct to be part of a team can be as 
powerful as the one that tells us to be decent to other people. But suppose Milgram had been the 
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