International terrorism came into public consciousness during the Cold War. The publicity that accompanied grisly events such as the hundreds of hijackings of commercial jetliners, the Irish Republican Army's bombing campaign and other attacks against British authorities and civilians, the Black September Organization's massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut in 1983 made it seem that threats were everywhere. Conspiracy theories abounded, accusing the United States, the Soviet Union, and their various partners of harboring, supporting, and even directing terrorists.
In the two-volume edited collection Terrorism in the Cold War, a bevy of mostly European scholars seeks to illuminate the connections between terrorist actors and the states that supported, harbored, and tolerated them. Drawing on interviews and documents from the...