1974 — Aug 6, Los Angeles Int. Airport bomb, near Pan American overseas check-in, CA–3

–4 Post Advocate, Alhambra, CA. “4 Killed in LAX Bombing,” Aug 6, 1974.
–3 Los Angeles Times. “Before Brussels, LAX was repeatedly a target of Terrorism.” 3-22-2016.
–3 Newsweek. “T is for Terror,” July 9, 2003.

Narrative Information

Newsweek: “Feb. 27 – I got a letter from the Alphabet Bomber the other day…. So I opened it. There were indeed copies of several papers, and scrawled on the back: “DEAR MR. DICKEY: YOU COULD ASCEND TO WORLD PROMINENCE BY BEING THE FIRST WHO UNDERSTOOD THIS LETTER. M. KURBEGOVICH.”….

“It described Muharem Kurbegovic…as tall, blond, blue-eyed and originally from Sarajevo, having immigrated to the United States in 1967: ‘Subject gained notoriety as the ‘Alphabet Bomber’ in 1974 by firebombing the houses of a judge and two police commissioners, firebombing one of the commissioner’s car [sic], burning down two Marina Del Rey apartment buildings and bombing the Pan Am Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, killing three people and injuring eight.’ Convicted in 1980 on ‘25 counts of Murder, Arson, Illegal Use of Explosives and related charges. Sentenced to life in prison, the subject has whiled away the hours in San Quentin [where he then was] by mailing death threats against U.S. presidents and other U.S. and foreign officials.’

“Kurbegovich, as he now spells his name, was in fact more dangerous than the Unabomber of the 1990s, and a great deal more frightening…

“Kurbegovich, an engineer who worked for aerospace industries and pretended to be a deaf-mute to evade the Vietnam-era draft, was a denizen of public libraries in that pre-Internet age. From them he pulled together what were then just-declassified cookbooks for weapons of mass destruction. A quarter century before Osama bin Laden’s training camps taught holy warriors how to generate poisonous cyanide gas near the air-conditioning intakes of high-rise buildings, Kurbegovich bought 25 pounds of potassium cyanide and nitric acid to do just that. He hid it so effectively in his Los Angeles apartment that the police didn’t find the chemical stockpile until he told them about it—more than two years after his arrest.

“Yet what made Kurbegovich’s reign of terror in the summer of 1974 so intense and, for a few weeks, so successful was his ability to integrate conventional bombs and the threat of chemical weapons into a strategy that today’s U.S. military would call ‘information warfare.’ His first chemical attack was by postcard. On July 7, 1974, he left a tape cassette in a planter at the Los Angeles Times claiming he put nerve gas on tiny lead disks hidden under 11-cent stamps on postcards mailed June 15 to all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. As he explained on the tape, ‘Each postcard shows the Palm Springs [Calif.] home of entertainer Bob Hope and reads as follows: ‘It is justices of your greatness that made this nation so great. Respectfully, Bob Hope’.’ As it turned out, nine such postcards had indeed been intercepted at the Palm Springs post office on June 16, where the canceling machines had broken the tiny vials under the stamps. The foreman thought they were toy caps.

“Kurbegovich admitted a few weeks later, in another threatening tape, that the postcards were a hoax and the liquid in the vials innocuous. But he knew it was the idea that sowed terror as much as the reality. ‘A reasonable man will pause to think if someone points a gun at him,’ he said, ‘whether the gun is loaded or empty.’ It’s the same idea now embraced, on a much more horrendous scale, by Osama bin Laden and his acolytes….

“Kurbegovich was ‘a terrorist ahead of his time,’ writes Jeffrey Simon in the Monterey Institute’s 2002 volume on Toxic Terror, which is the most thorough analytical account I’ve seen. Though Kurbegovich had no organization and no outside support, he claimed to be Isak Rasim, military commander of a group he called Aliens of America. He was dubbed ‘The Alphabet Bomber’ after he dropped off an audiotape at a CBS affiliate in the aftermath of the gory LAX attack. ‘The first bomb was marked with the letter A, which stands for airport,’ he said. ‘The second bomb will be associated with the letter L, etc., until our name has been written on the face of this nation in blood.’ After a grim panic seized the city, he sent a warning about the next device, planted in a Greyhound bus station, in a locker—thus L. When it was found and eventually defused, it was the most powerful explosive device the bomb squad had ever handled. ‘He had credibility,’ the state prosecutor told Simon later. ‘He had the city of L.A. in fear.’

“The Alphabet Bomber was caught, at last, because his targets were too personal. His apocalyptic terrorism had grown out of a private vendetta against a judge and commissioners he blamed for preventing him from opening a hall for ‘taxi dancers,’ where women were paid to slow-dance with lonely men like him. He’d been caught in a lewd situation in one such hall, and that compromised his chances to start his business, even threatened his chances of becoming an American citizen. So the central demands of his terrorist campaign were an end to immigration and naturalization laws, as well as any laws about sex. CIA voice analysis of his tapes pinpointed Kurbegovich’s Yugoslav origins. Court records of the cases handled by his first targets—the judge and the police commissioners—triangulated his identity. He was tailed for a while, then picked up after dropping off yet another threatening tape in the bathroom of a family restaurant….” (Newsweek. “T is for Terror,” July 9, 2003.)

Sources

Los Angeles Times. “Before Brussels, LAX was repeatedly a target of Terrorism.” 3-22-2016. Accessed 12-21-2021 at: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-before-brussels-lax-was-target-of-terrorism-20160322-story.html

Newsweek. “T is for Terror,” July 9, 2003. Accessed at: http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/MajorIncident-index.htm

Post Advocate, Alhambra, CA. “4 Killed in LAX Bombing,” 8-6-1974. Accessed at: http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/MajorIncident-index.htm