Ten years after I first wrote about terrorism, evidence supporting my initial idea continues to accumulate: that alcohol and other-drug addiction is at the root of most terrorism. A retrospective look at the decade.
Ten Years After 9-11: Sadly, Hardly Anyone has Connected the Dots Linking Terrorism to Substance Addiction
Ten years ago, my wife and I were about to fly from Cusco to Lima, Peru on an early morning flight after an extraordinary stay at the fabulous El Monasterio Hotel before and after visiting the amazing ruins of Machu Picchu. It was the final leg of our three-week visit to South America, where we skied Portillo, Chile and Bariloche, Argentina, stayed at the International Hotel in Santiago, Chile (and fell in love with the country) and did the fabulous Andean “Lake Crossing” from Bariloche to Puerto Montt, Chile. We were due in Lima late morning, where we were to catch a 1a.m. flight to LAX via Lan Chile (now LAN Airlines). We were told, however, that our plane, arriving from the jungles of Iquitos, Peru, was late because a “bird had flown into the windshield, shattering it” and it would take a bit to fix. By about 9a.m. we were really wondering whether we’d get out of a city which, at 10,000 feet in elevation, you apparently can’t safely fly out of after noon.
Unfortunately, it was the wrong day to try to leave Peru and a really bad day to have gotten out of Cusco, which we both loved.
At about 10a.m. we were beginning to hear rumors of the United States coming under attack. By the time we got into Lima, it was becoming apparent we were not getting out quickly. And Lima is not a city the ordinary traveler wants to be stuck in for several days.
From our hotel room, we watched the tragedy of 9-11 unfold, collapsing buildings and more (quite a bit more on the Spanish CNN than, apparently, on the U.S. version). When we arrived at LAX three days later (Lan Chile was among the first airliners allowed back in the states), we could feel it was a different world.
About six weeks later I called into a late-night radio show, “Mr. KABC” (hosted by Marc Germain), which had an unusual format: the caller was never screened and could ask Mr. KABC anything. I asked what he thought the mindset of your typical terrorist might be, to which he gave me his analysis. After I held my tongue for five minutes or so, he stopped and I asked, “Would you like to hear my theory?” He responded “sure,” and I gave him a quick synopsis of alcohol- and other-drug addicted egomania as the root cause for much in the way of misbehaviors ranging from the mundane to horrific, including terrorism. Doug McIntyre, who hosted the “Red Eye Radio Show” from midnight to 5a.m. was just walking in and yelled out, “He’s right! Put him on with me. I want to talk to him!”
McIntyre told me he thought I was absolutely right in hypothesizing that most terrorist acts are rooted in alcoholic egomania. Along the way, he invited me onto his show and I learned why he so quickly picked up on the idea: at the time he had six years or so of sobriety.
I thought he wouldn’t be the last to publicly acknowledge that I might be on to something. Unfortunately, when confronted with the possibility that alcoholism is the cause of most misbehaviors, those affected often ignore the evidence for years, until reaching a breaking point, as Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson in “The Closer” did (purposely wearing blinders before finally telling her recovering alcoholic FBI husband Agent Fritz Howard “Tell me everything I don’t want to know”). It’s the subject that, present company excepted, no one wants to read or hear about, even though it explains at least 80% of the bad- to horrific acts we see or hear about every day.
I wrote a piece (still posted on the web site) laying out the idea that the best explanation for behaviors resulting from a mindset like that of Osama bin Laden was brain damage from substance addiction. I pointed out that many despots from our past, from Josef Stalin to Mao Zedong, were alcohol/other-drug addicts, as have been most serial and mass murderers. At the time, I would have told you I’m sure not every mass murderer in U.S. history was an addict—I often said Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh might not be—only later discovering he was an amphetamine addict. In nearly every case for which we are able to dig deep enough, gold-standard proof of addiction in those exhibiting terrorist-like behaviors is eventually found. I also shared what I had found on the hijackers: three were at a bar the night before where two drank “heavily”; another had two DUIs; the father of a fifth told reporters his son was not a “drinker,” while an uncle said his nephew “enjoyed” alcohol (which is very likely a euphemism for “drank alcoholically”); and the 12 other hijackers referred to as the “muscle” were reported as indulging “often” in liquor. I pointed out that religious proscriptions have never kept an addict from imbibing and increase the odds of addiction in those who do.
I also gave a list of the sort of behaviors and mindsets that we can readily observe in addicts, including habitual blaming of others for their own problems (or their group’s problems), an inflated ego resulting in a sense of being equal to God, a sense of invincibility evident in reckless behaviors, the capricious wielding of power over others and dangerous non-substance compulsions such as religious fanaticism. All of these fit the profile of the terrorist.
In the ten years that followed, I investigated other terrorists, read much and wrote a number of top stories on the subject (including issues #3, 4, 13, 24, 28, 42 and 53 on the web site here). In 2005 The Economist magazine pointed out that terrorists often have “grown apart from family; some might have drifted into petty crime, or an unIslamic taste for alcohol and women,” but didn’t point out that “petty crime” is as certain an indication of alcoholism as is the “taste” for it. The piece also pointed out that young alienated Muslims may turn to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing radical Islam as a solution. It failed to mention that abstinent alcoholics, because they have done nothing to deflate the massive ego, become dry drunks and are, in the right circumstances, capable of as much mayhem as when they were drinking.
Although I already knew that some of the most horrific people who ever lived were alcoholics (Ivan the Terrible comes to mind), I found subtle but compelling indications of addiction in others. One was Robespierre, who is thought by many to have been a teetotaler. However, I stumbled onto a book that reported, “At meals, he eats the same fare as his hosts and shares with them an inferior wine. When dinner is over, he drinks coffee, then stays in the house for an hour to receive visitors, after which he commonly goes out….He returns home at a remarkably late hour. He often works past midnight…[and he] never returns before midnight. Where he is, at such times, no one knows.” It’s reminiscent of FBI agent Robert Hanssen’s late-night drives to a park where, if even half-accurately portrayed in the movie “Breach,” he was likely secretly drinking for years while by day selling more secrets to the Soviets than any traitor, ever.
There were many more terrorists who, with the exception of Niyazov, below, I’ve never written about but easily could have, whether so-called “heads of state” or the more common variety. They include:
1. Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan (“He thinks he’s the Messiah” and is a binge drinker known for drinking a quart and a half of vodka in a single day, but he “never loses control”).
2. Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan, who developed a personality cult so extreme his picture was on everything from all money to a corner of every TV screen, in whom alcoholism was privately confirmed by a diplomat.
3. Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, known as the “Butcher of the Balkans,” who “drank heavily.”
4. Warren Kimbro, an ex-Black Panther who, after fatally shooting another Black Panther because party members thought was an FBI informant, went to prison and rehabilitated himself off of drugs, later leading a nonprofit devoted to helping ex-cons reenter society (his conduct was so exemplary he was pardoned after serving only 4 ½ years of a “life” sentence).
5. Colleen LaRose, known as “Jihad Jane,” who rarely left her apartment except at night, when she’d “go drinking and get into fights.”
6. David Headley, who federal authorities claimed was a terrorist accused of helping coordinate the 2008 terrorist assault on Mumbai in which more than 160 people were killed, known by friends to be “a ladies’ man” and known by his father to “have a Koran under one arm and a bottle of Dom Perignon under the other.” He also spent a month in drug rehab in 1994.
As I wrote in the Top Story of issue #13, “Tantalizing Clues to Alcoholism in Suicide Bombers,” “It’s [often] impossible to obtain direct evidence and, therefore, proof of addiction in people who are far removed from the public spotlight.” It’s also difficult at best to prove those in the spotlight, whose secrets are protected by enablers, are alcoholics. I have been unable to get gold-standard proof of addiction in Liberia’s Charles Taylor, whose drugged-up fighters in the Sierra Leone were notorious for ‘wide awake” amputations, but the behaviors and the fact that his alleged fighters were “drugged-up” are compelling. I can’t find proof of addiction in Cambodia’s Pol Pot, but the behaviors were so similar to those of Ivan the Terrible it’s almost unimaginable that he wasn’t drinking or using addictively as Ivan did. The same is true of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, but as I said about Timothy McVeigh, perhaps he is the exception. On the other hand, his style and that of the others in whom I haven’t yet been able to prove alcoholism seem similar to that of terrorist Che Guevara, who according to Alvaro Vargas Llosa in The Che Guevara Myth, “tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling—a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life.” If Muslim extremists act similarly, they impose their Puritanism on others but not themselves, behaviors for which recovering alcoholics have a saying: one finger out, three fingers back. In other words, do as I say and not as I do, because I am above the law—and more powerful than God.