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This article studies the epidemic of kidnappings across six countries between 1968 and 1990. The goal is to identify those factors that determine the operational decisions made by terrorists. Why and how do terrorists decide to engage in certain types of actions but not others? The article discusses a number of scholarly approaches, and the variables these studies have put forward to explain the decisionmaking processes within terrorist organizations. The argument made here is that the groups' ideological preferences, strategic analysis, and need to attract media attention did not appear to exert much influence in the terrorists' decision to kidnap. Organizational resources and the nature of the security environment in which the terrorists operated had some bearing. However, kidnappings became attractive when terrorists made a pragmatic evaluation of the reaction by governments and the public and consequently of the costs or benefits of a particular course of action. The decision to carry out a campaign of kidnappings, or to abstain from kidnapping, should be interpreted as clear evidence of terrorist learning. Two types of learning appear to have influenced the adoption of kidnappings: learning by observing others and learning by doing.In December 1973, the Basque Euskadi ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty, or ETA) assassinated the Spanish prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. This was a spectacular feat that eliminated any possibility of a continuation of Francoism after General Francisco Franco's death, greatly eased the advent of democracy, and therefore colored the Spaniards' views on ETA for a decade. ETA was quite candid in its book-length account of this operation:ETA was given a secret news report that in Madrid Luis Carrero Blanco went to mass every morning at 9 in a Jesuit church on Serrano Street … it appeared that there wasn't much guarding of Carrero. It might even be possible to kidnap him. That's the real way the idea of kidnapping Carrero came about. It would have been more logical for us to have planned to kidnap Carrero and then find the means of doing it. But life is always a little topsy-turvy, and in this case, we did it backwards. 1 Without that tip on Carrero's church attendance, which ETA obtained by chance, the operation might not have been conceived. Surveillance convinced ETA that the kidnapping CONTACT Maria Rasmussen

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