Word: ransoming
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Ideas vary about what limits should be set. Harry Howe Ransom, professor of political science and an intelligence specialist at Vanderbilt University, believes that "covert operations represent an act just short of war. If we use them, it should be where acts of war would otherwise...
...necessary." Ransom would permit covert actions only when U.S. security is clearly in jeopardy. William T.R. Fox, professor of international relations at Columbia University, would additionally permit them "to undo the spread of Hitler and other like governments." Dean Harvey Picker of Columbia's School of International Affairs would allow clandestine operations to prevent nuclear war. As Senator Church points out, however, the "national security considerations must be compelling" for covert action to be justified. For his part, Colby declines to say under what precise circumstances he would favor covert action...
White Gloves. Last Tuesday, after four days of talks, the terrorists accepted a Dutch offer of $300,000 in exchange for the hostages (France earlier had refused to meet a $1 million ransom demand). Wearing black hoods and white gloves and holding guns at the backs of six hostages (three had been left behind because they were sick), the commandos boarded a bus to go to Schiphol Airport. After the hostages boarded the Boeing, Furuya was handed over to the terrorists. Then, as a flight crew boarded the aircraft, the hostages one by one disembarked. Surrounded by hundreds of troops...
...looking disheveled, and a tape recording in which he supposedly agreed, à la Patty Hearst, with his captors' aims. "He is a bourgeois and represents the exploiting class," said the kidnapers' proclamation. "We social fighters are obliged to use revolutionary means." The group demanded $1.6 million in ransom and the release often political prisoners, all leftists. Both requests were officially ignored by the government. Then last Saturday he was released, but it was not disclosed what-if anything-his kidnapers got in return...
...employees of Tenneco, Inc., along with U.N. Geologist Matti Tavela, 54, an American working in Ethiopia-have been held. Their captors are members of the Eritrean Liberation Front (E.L.F.), which is waging a bloody secessionist battle. Tenneco has already agreed to an E.L.F. demand for $3 million in ransom, but the Ethiopian government refuses to meet another demand to release five jailed guerrillas. Meanwhile, the four captives survive mainly on a sour porridge called durra, the staple of the region. Not surprisingly, they have all lost weight. But, as Tavela told an Italian journalist who recently toured the guerrilla territory...