Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

FARABUNDO MARTÍ NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT • 171– F –FALSE-FLAG TERRORISM. Terrorist acts that are committed byone group, which then attributes the action to another group in orderto throw investigators off track, are referred to as instances of “falseflag” terrorism. This term has also been used when national governmentsfalsely attribute terrorism to a group in order to justify retaliationagainst a specific group or military intervention against a nationaccused of having been the state sponsor of an action against thenation making the false-flag accusation. Following the Pan AmericanWorld Airways (Pan Am) Flight 103 bombing, credit for thebombing was claimed in the name of the Guardians of the IslamicRevolution, a pro-Iranian group. In retrospect this appears to havebeen a false flag by Libya to throw off investigators that was all themore plausible, since the USS Vincennes had accidentally shot downIran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988.After a series of five apartment bombings within Russia in September1999 killed more than 300 people, the Russia mass media reported thatcredit for these attacks had been claimed by Chechen terrorists whoseleader, Shamil Basayef, denied any Chechen responsibility. After thesecessionist Chechen republic refused to extradite those whom Russiaclaimed were suspects in the apartment bombings, Russia invadedChechnya on 30 September 1999, initiating the Second Chechen War,in which Russia reimposed its control over the republic. Critics of theRussian government, then headed by President Boris Yeltsin and PrimeMinister Vladimir Putin, such as the émigré Russian tycoon BorisBerezovsky and the defector Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russianintelligence officer, both claimed that the Federal Security Bureau, orRussian intelligence service, had itself carried out the bombings to createa pretext for the invasion of Chechnya. If true, this would be an exampleof the second form of false-flag terrorism. Similarly, critics of theadministration of U.S. President George W. Bush claim that it exploitedfalse associations of the regime of Saddam Hussein with al Qa’eda andits World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11,2001 in order to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.FARABUNDO MARTÍ NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT. TheFrente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) was anumbrella group uniting several leftist guerrilla groups that sought to