Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 20, 1995                   TAG: 9504200090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

ATTACK LOOKS LIKE BEIRUT BOMBING

``This is the big one,'' said one security specialist.

``It has to be a turning point, a watershed,'' said Stanley Bedlington, a retired senior analyst at the CIA's counterterrorist center.

With investigators focusing on who was behind the bombing, attention quickly turned to a Middle East connection.

A law enforcement source said there were several facts that suggested such a link, such as the size and sophistication of the bomb as well as information that there are several militant Middle Eastern groups based in Oklahoma. One of the groups, the source said, is called the Muslim Community of Al-Jihad, which lists a post office box in Granite, Okla.

``It is unfair to suspect all Muslims, but there is a militant fringe there,'' he said.

One image seems to have triggered the same conclusion among counter-terrorism officers - a TV shot of the building, one whole side sheared away.

A couple of hours after the explosion, an intelligence officer was talking on the phone to a journalist. ``At this point we don't have any idea who did it,'' he was saying. As he spoke, he noticed TV footage of the building. ``Whoops,'' he said. ``Looks like Beirut.''

The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, was the work of a suicide car bomber and killed 63 people, 17 of them Americans. Similar methods were used in the bombing in July of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, where 95 people died. The radical Islamic Hezbollah group is believed to have been responsible for both those bombings.

Pointing to similarities between the World Trade Center attack and Oklahoma City, one federal official said: ``To develop a bomb of that size and to carry out a terrorist strike of this magnitude suggests a high level of planning and sophistication. It would require a sustained commitment.''

Elie Krakowski, a Boston University professor of international affairs and a former consultant to the Pentagon on terrorism, warned that without aggressive countermeasures, the United States could see more such attacks.

``The signature looks Middle Eastern,'' noted Sherman Teichman, an expert on terrorism at Tufts University. ``But we have to be very careful not to be too quick to judge. It is too easy to demonize the region and the religion of Islam.''

By the middle of the afternoon, the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and an array of other intelligence and security organizations had convened in Washington to pull together what they knew.

They agreed that the modus operandi looked very much like Beirut. Eight individuals had phoned to claim responsibility; all but one or two were from groups that appeared to be Middle Eastern. One other came from an extremist ``militia'' that seemed to be some sort of survivalist group.