Gareth Porter
July 2, 2009 - Asia Times
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On June 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed United States Air Force personnel, killing 19 airmen and wounding 372.
Immediately after the blast, more than 125 agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were ordered to the site to sift for clues and begin the investigation of who was responsible. But when two US Embassy officers arrived at the scene of the devastation early the next morning, they found a bulldozer beginning to dig up the entire crime scene.
The Saudi bulldozing stopped only after Scott Erskine, the supervisory FBI special agent for international terrorism investigations, threatened that secretary of state Warren Christopher, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia when the bomb exploded, would intervene personally on the matter.
United States intelligence then intercepted communications from the highest levels of the Saudi government, including interior minister Prince Nayef, to the governor and other officials of Eastern Province instructing them to go through the motions of cooperating with US officials on their investigation but to obstruct it at every turn.
That was the beginning of what interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with the investigation and other information now available reveal was a systematic effort by the Saudis to obstruct any US investigation of the bombing and to deceive the US about who was responsible for it.
The Saudi regime steered the FBI investigation toward Iran and its Saudi Shi'ite allies with the apparent intention of keeping US officials away from a trail of evidence that would have led to Osama bin Laden and a complex set of ties between the regime and the Saudi terrorist organizer.
The key to the success of the Saudi deception was FBI director Louis Freeh, who took personal charge of the FBI investigation, letting it be known within the Bureau that he was the "case officer" for the probe, according to former FBI officials.
Freeh allowed Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to convince him that Iran was involved in the bombing, and that former president Bill Clinton, for whom he had formed a visceral dislike, "had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers," as Freeh wrote in his memoirs.
The Khobar Towers investigation soon became Freeh's vendetta against Clinton. "Freeh was pursuing this for his own personal agenda," says former FBI agent Jack Cloonan.
A former high-ranking FBI official recalls that Freeh "was always meeting with Bandar". And many of the meetings were not in Freeh's office but at Bandar's 38-room home in McLean, Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Saudis were refusing the most basic FBI requests for cooperation. When Ray Mislock, who headed the National Security Division of the FBI's Washington Field Office, requested permission to go door to door to interview witnesses in the neighborhood, the Saudis refused.
"It's our responsibility," Mislock recalls being told. "We'll do the interviews."
But the Saudis never conducted such interviews. The same thing happened when Mislock requested access to phone records for the immediate area surrounding Khobar Towers.
Soon after the bombing, officials of the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, began telling their FBI and CIA contacts that they had begun arresting members of a little known Shi'ite group called "Saudi Hezbollah", which Saudi and US intelligence had long believed was close to Iran. They claimed that they had extensive intelligence information linking the group to the Khobar Towers bombing.
But a now declassified July 1996 report by CIA analysts on the bombing reveals that the Mabahith claims were considered suspect. The report said the Mabahith "have not shown US officials their evidence ... nor provided many details on their investigation".
Nevertheless, Freeh quickly made Iranian and Saudi Shi'ite responsibility for the bombing the official premise of the investigation, excluding from the inquiry the hypothesis that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.
"There was never, ever a doubt in my mind about who did this," says a former FBI official involved in the investigation who refused to be identified.
FBI and CIA experts on Osama bin Laden tried unsuccessfully to play a role in the Khobar Towers investigation. Jack Cloonan, a member of the FBI's I-49 unit, which was building a legal case against bin Laden over previous terrorist actions, recalls asking the Washington Field Office (WFO), which had direct responsibility for the investigation, to allow such I-49 participation, only to be rebuffed.
"The WFO was hypersensitive and told us to f*ck off," says Cloonan.
The CIA's bin Laden unit, which had only been established in early 1996, was also excluded by CIA leadership from that agency's work on the bombing.
Two or three days after the Khobar bombing, recalls Dan Coleman, an FBI agent assigned to the unit, the agency "locked down" its own investigation, creating an encrypted "passline" that limited access to information related to Khobar investigation to the handful of people at the CIA who were given that code.
The head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Michael Scheuer, was not included among that small group.
Nevertheless, Scheuer instructed his staff to put together all the information the station had collected from all sources - human assets, electronic intercepts and open sources - indicating that there would be an al-Qaeda operation in Saudi Arabia after the bombing in Riyadh the previous November.
The result was a four-page memo which ticked off the evidence that bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization had been planning a military operation involving explosives in Saudi in 1996.
"One of the places mentioned in the memo was Khobar," says Scheuer. "They were moving explosives from Port Said through Suez Canal to the Red Sea and to Yemen, then infiltrating them across the border with Saudi Arabia."
A few days after receiving the bin Laden unit's four-page memo, the head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Winston Wiley, one of the few CIA officials who was privy to information on the investigation, came to Scheuer's office and closed the door. Wiley opened up a folder which had only one document in it - a translated intercept of an internal Iranian communication in which there was a reference to Khobar Towers. "Are you satisfied?" Wiley asked.
Scheuer replied that it was only one piece of information in a much bigger universe of information that pointed in another direction. "If that's all there is," he told Wiley, "I would say it was very interesting and ought to be followed up, but it isn't definitive."
But the signal from the CIA leadership was clear: Iran had already been identified as responsible for the Khobar bombing plot, and there was no interest in pursuing the bin Laden angle.
In September 1996, bin Laden's former business agent Jamal al-Fadl, who had left al-Qaeda over personal grievances, walked into the US Embassy in Eritrea and immediately began providing the best intelligence the United States had ever gotten on bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
But the CIA and FBI made no effort take advantage of his knowledge to get information on possible al-Qaeda involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing, according to Dan Coleman, one of al-Fadl's FBI handlers.
"We were never given any questions to ask him about Khobar Towers," says Coleman.
Telltale signs of fraud
In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi'ite detainees.
The alleged confessions portrayed the bombing as the work of a cell of Saudi Hezbollah that had had carried out surveillance of US targets under the direction of an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer before hatching a plot to blow up the Khobar Towers facility.
But the documents were curiously short of the kind of details that would have allowed US investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved in the investigation.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by torture. At Attorney General Janet Reno's insistence, both Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh said publicly in early 1997 that the Saudis had provided little more than "hearsay" evidence on the bombing.
There were also major anomalies in the alleged confessions of Shi'ite plotters that should have aroused the suspicions of FBI investigators.
The Saudis claimed that on March 28, 1996, Saudi guards at the al-Haditha border crossing with Jordan had discovered 38 kilograms of plastic explosives hidden in a car driven by a Saudi Hezbollah member. That member not only admitted to his Saudi Hezbollah membership, according to the Saudi account, but led the secret police to three more Saudi Hezbollah members, who were allegedly arrested on April 6, 7 and 8.
What was peculiar about that account is that on April 17, 1996, Saudi officials had announced that they had found explosives in a car at the border with Jordan on March 29, and said that "a number of people" had been arrested. And four days later, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef had announced the arrest of four men in the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. Their confessions were broadcast on Saudi television that same day.
In the announcement of the arrests, reported by the New York Times, Nayef referred to the arms smuggling attempt of March 29, saying it was still not clear if the November blast in Riyadh and the smuggling attempt were related.
That statement had clearly implied that Saudi officials had reason to believe that there was a link between the jihadist network believed to have carried out the Riyadh bombing and those who had been caught after the March 29 explosive smuggling attempt.
After the Khobar bombing, however, the Saudis began to link the interception of explosives in late March to the Shi'ite they were saying had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.
One day in July, according to a former Clinton administration official, Freeh came into the White House situation room livid with anger, telling officials there he had just learned that the Saudis had arrested a Saudi Hezbollah activist in March with concealed explosives and had discovered the Shi'ite plot to bomb Khobar Towers.
Nayef's statement suggesting a possible tie to the Riyadh bombing of the previous November was a deliberate deception of the United States, which the Saudis never explained to US officials. "We asked why they didn't tell us about this earlier and didn't get an answer," says Williams.
If the Saudis had actually arrested the four Saudi Hezbollah members who had been ordered to carry out the bombing, as they later claimed, it would have been known immediately to the rest of the Saudi Hezbollah organization, which would obviously have called off the bomb plot and fled the country.
Further undermining the Shi'ite explosives smuggling and bomb plot story is the fact that the Saudis had secretly detained and tortured a number of veteran Sunni jihadists with ties to bin Laden after the bombing.
The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later revealed to have been the actual head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, al-Uyayri confirmed in al-Qaeda's regular publication that he had been arrested and tortured after the Khobar bombing.
A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.
A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi'ite.
According to a Norwegian specialist on the Saudi jihadi movement, Thomas Hegghammer, in 2003 - shortly before al-Uyayri was killed in a shoot-out in Riyadh in late May 2003 - an article by the al-Qaeda leader in the al-Qaeda periodical blamed Shi'ites for the Khobar bombing.
In a paper for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Hegghammer cites that statement as evidence that al Qaeda wasn't involved in Khobar. But one of al-Uyayri's main objectives at that point would have been to stay out of prison, so his endorsement of the Saudi regime's position is hardly surprising.
Al-Uyayri had been released from prison in mid-1998, by his own account. But he was arrested again in late 2002 or early 2003, by which time the CIA had come to believe that he was a very important figure in al-Qaeda, even though it didn't know he was the leader of al-Qaeda in the peninsula, according to Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine.
In mid-March 2003, Suskind writes, US officials pressed the Saudis not to let him go. But the Saudis claimed they had nothing on al-Uyayri, and a few weeks later he was released again. The head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi secret police were playing a complex game.
The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000 pounds of explosives - the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tons of explosives had entered the country.
Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged plotters got their hands on that much explosives. And one former FBI official who continues to defend the conclusions of the investigation flatly refused to tell this writer whether the investigation had turned up information bearing on that question.
If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than 50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert. There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing.
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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
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