From: "Steve Wingate" 
Subject: IUFO: (Fwd) Secret Service Report Challenges Assassin Stereot
Date: 9 Aug 1998 20:04:40 -0400
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Date:          Sun, 9 Aug 1998 10:26:28 EDT
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Subject:       [CTRL] Secret Service Report Challenges Assassin Stereotypes
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 -Caveat Lector-

Secret Service Report Challenges Assassin Stereotypes

By BILL DEDMAN


  CHICAGO -- Portraits of assassins are fixed in the American mind: the
deranged madman, the lonely loser obsessed with his target, the political
killer following threats with violence.

  These portraits are the stuff of myth, the Secret Service has concluded in
"Preventing Assassination," a new study of all 83 people who attacked or tried
to attack an American political figure or celebrity in the last 50 years.

  Agents and psychologists analyzed the lives and actions of Lee Harvey
Oswald, John Hinckley and lesser players. The study was bolstered by
interviews with a special corps of collaborators, 23 of the assassins
themselves.

  The results, recently made available, challenge several stereotypes. Fewer
than half of the assassins showed symptoms of mental illness. Many shifted
from one target to another, valuing the act more than the victim. Not one had
communicated a direct threat to the target or to law-enforcement authorities.

  The good news, the Secret Service says, is that assassins are recognizable,
not by who they are, but by what they do. Though assassins fit no physical or
psychological profile, most share a pattern of behavior. Assassination is not
a spontaneous event, but a trail of action that can lead to discovery.

  "It is far more productive, and ultimately more accurate," the Secret
Service concluded, "to examine a chain of thinking that leads a person to see
assassination as an acceptable or necessary action, and to attend to behaviors
that may precede an attack, than to simply label assassins and assassination
as 'irrational' or 'crazy."'

  Lessons from the five-year research project are changing the way the Secret
Service identifies and investigates people who may pose a threat to the
President and other public figures. Experts outside the Secret Service say the
study is helping efforts to prevent stalking, workplace assaults and other
forms of targeted violence.

  The emerging art of "protective intelligence" was put in the spotlight on
July 24, when two policemen were killed at the Capitol in Washington. The
intentions of the accused gunman, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., may never be
known. It is known that in 1996 he was interviewed by the Secret Service after
he made apparently delusional comments about President Clinton. Later, after
threatening a neighbor, he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital
for paranoid schizophrenia.

  Each year, the Secret Service tries to assess the risk posed by about 2,000
people. Some have made explicit or vague threats against the president or
another national leader. Others expressed romantic interest in a public
figure, pressed grievances that seemed unreasonable or tried to volunteer as a
protector.

  In most cases, as with Weston, the Secret Service finds that the person
presents a low risk and the case is closed. Only about 4 percent are arrested.
About 13 percent are committed to mental health treatment, many voluntarily,
and often because they are a threat to themselves or others near them, not to
someone under Secret Service protection.

  Protective intelligence is part science, part old-fashioned investigation
and part common sense. It is not foolproof. In 1975, for example, Secret
Service agents judged that Sara Jane Moore was no threat, and police officers
took a gun away from her, the day before she shot at President Gerald R. Ford.

  In 1992 the Secret Service started the Exceptional Case Study Project, which
begins with a 1949 case, when Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a 19-year-old fan, shot
star baseball player Eddie Waitkus in a Chicago hotel. He survived.

  Other cases include the killings of John Lennon, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and the attacks by the Unabomber.

  Americans have long assumed that assassins fit a profile. But the Secret
Service found no profile of background or description fitting enough assassins
to be helpful in deciding who is dangerous. Eighty-six percent were men.
Seventy-seven percent were white. The youngest was 16 and the oldest was 73.

  About half the assassins were single and had never been married, and one in
three had children. Almost half had gone to college. Several had successful
careers. Only one in five had been arrested as an adult for a violent offense.

  "It would be inaccurate to dismiss these attackers and near-attackers as
inadequate, unaccomplished losers," the report says.

  "None were models of emotional well-being," the Secret Service concluded,
"but relatively few suffered from serious mental illnesses that caused their
attack behaviors."

  Forty-four percent of the assassins had histories of serious depression or
despair. Fifty-four percent had a history of harassing others. Forty-one
percent had made suicide threats.

  Thirty-eight percent of the assassins had been hospitalized at least once
for psychiatric reasons, ranging from long-term treatment to brief admissions
for suicidal threats. An additional 23 percent had been evaluated or treated
by a mental health professional, ranging from counseling during adolescence to
years of care for mental disability. In all, 43 percent had a history of
delusions, but only 10 percent claimed to hear voices telling them to attack.

  A stronger pattern emerged in their recent experiences. Nearly all had
suffered a recent trauma, like a marital breakup or job loss.

  "What does seem clear is that, for almost all subjects, attacks or near-
lethal approaches occurred after a period of downward spiral in their lives,"
the Secret Service found.

  The most frequent motive that assassins gave for attacking a public figure
was to achieve notoriety or fame. Only a few wanted political change or acted
in a group. Other assassins wanted to avenge a perceived wrong, to end their
pain by being imprisoned or hospitalized or killed, to save the country or the
world, to achieve a special relationship with the target, or, rarely, to obey
voices ordering them to attack.

  Assassins seeking fame usually chose a prominent victim. Feelings about the
target were irrelevant.

  "I would have voted for him if I hadn't been in jail charged with trying to
kill him," one unidentified attacker told the researchers.

  One-third of the assassins considered more than one target. Oswald, for
example, fired a shot at a retired general less than a year before killing
President John F. Kennedy in 1963. And Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter
and actress Jodie Foster before shooting President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

  The Secret Service still investigates all people who make a threat, but it
no longer assumes that a threat precedes an attack. "Although some threateners
may pose a real threat, usually they do not," the Secret Service said.
"However, most importantly, those who pose threats frequently do not make
threats."

  The Secret Service has written a guide for state and local officials on
preventing assassinations and other violence directed at individuals. The
guide and the research report are now available from the National Institute of
Justice (800-851-3420 or 810 Seventh Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20531).

  "This work has broken new ground in the way people study targeted violence,"
said Randy Borum, a forensic psychologist and assistant professor at Duke
University Medical Center. "The Secret Service has steered people away from
the myths."

  While robbing them of their mystique, the Secret Service gives America's
assassins the only thanks that their government is likely to bestow upon them.
"We are also deeply grateful," the authors write, "to the men and women who
were subjects of this study and who consented to be interviewed."




Sunday, August 9, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York
Times

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Wingate
N. California Director
SKYWATCH INTERNATIONAL

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