Gareth Porter
July 4, 2009 - Asia Times
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One of the United States government's top investigators on al-Qaeda, veteran agent Dan Coleman, has a theory that Osama bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned, but not for those he had not planned.
For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and told his former business agent turned Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.
As noted by the head of the bin Laden unit at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Scheuer, in the 1995 Riyadh and 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia a common operational feature was identified: the vehicle carrying the explosives was not parked so as to bring the entire building down.
If the team executing the Khobar bombing had parked parallel to the security fence rather than backing up to it, says Scheuer, it would have destroyed the entire building. The same thing had happened in the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh which killed five US airmen and wounded 34.
The bin Laden unit of the CIA had collected concrete intelligence on bin Laden's role in planning the Khobar Towers bombing. In mid-January, 1996, according to the intelligence compiled by the unit, bin Laden traveled to Doha, Qatar, where plans were discussed for attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden arranged for 20 tons of high explosive C-4 to be shipped from Poland to Qatar, two tons of which were to be sent to Saudi Arabia, the report said.
Bin Laden specifically referred to operations targeting US interests in the triangle of cities of Dammam, Dhahran and Khobar in Eastern Province, using clandestine al-Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, according to the intelligence reporting.
FBI agents working on the Khobar case simply rejected any evidence of bin Laden's involvement in Khobar, however, because the decision had already been made that the Shi'ites were responsible.
David Williams, then the FBI agent in charge of counter-terrorism, recalls that he had read intelligence reports suggesting bin Laden's involvement in the bombing, but says he had done so "with a suspicious eye".
The FBI investigators dismissed the relevance of the evidence linking bin Laden to the Riyadh bombing. As one former FBI official explained the logic of that position, the Khobar Towers bombing was completely different from the Riyadh bombing seven months earlier: it was in an area of Eastern Province where Shi'ite oppositionists were predominant and where al-Qaeda had no known cell.
The facts, however, told a different story. The city of Khobar itself was predominantly Sunni, not Shi'ite, and the triangular area of the three cities had a large population of veterans of the Afghan war who were followers of bin Laden. As a London-based Palestinian publication reported in August 1996, the six jihadis who confessed to the bombing were all from an area called al-Thoqba near Khobar.
One of the veteran jihadis detained after the bombing, Yusuf al-Ayayri, who was then the actual head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was from Dammam and knew the jihadi community in that region very well, according to Norwegian al-Qaeda specialist Thomas Hegghammer.
The FBI and CIA knew nothing about bin Laden's movement in that part of Saudi Arabia, however, because they were completely dependent on Saudi intelligence for such information. A CIA memorandum dated July 1, 1996, said the agency had "little information" about the "location, size, composition or activities" of opposition cells in Saudi Arabia.
Interviews with FBI officials involved in the investigation make it clear that they were not interested in evidence linking bin Laden to the bombing, because they understood their task to be limited to getting whatever information they could from Saudi officials.
Williams says he didn't question the Saudi account of the Khobar plot, because, "You start to believe the people who are your interlocutors."
Asked about the evidence that bin Laden was behind the plot, another FBI official with substantive responsibility for the investigation said, "I didn't get involved in that aspect. That wasn't my job."
In early November 1998, FBI director Louis Freeh sent a team of agents to observe Saudi secret police officials interviewing eight Shi'ite detainees from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center. He planned to use the Shi'ite testimony to show that Iran was behind the bombing.
As expected, the stories told by the detainees recapitulated the outlines of the Shi'ite plot that had already been described by the Saudis two years earlier. Now there were even more tantalizing details of direct Iranian involvement.
One of the detainees said Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Ahmad Sherifi had personally selected the Khobar barracks as a target. Another said the Saudi Hezbollah members had been not only trained but paid by the Iranians.
"We came away with solid evidence that Iran was behind it," says a former FBI agent.
There was one problem with the evidence the FBI team collected: the Saudi secret police had already had two-and-half years to coach the Saudi Hezbollah detainees on what to say about the case, with the ever-present threat of more torture to provide the incentive.
But Freeh was not about to let the torture issue interfere with his mission. "For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing," one former high-ranking FBI official said. "We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up."
When Freeh took the accounts from the Shi'ite detainees in interrogations witnessed by the FBI team, however, the Justice Department didn't buy them as valid testimony. The department refused to go ahead with an indictment as Freeh had desired, evidently based on the same objection that had been raised two years earlier: the Shi'ites had been subject to torture.
But in January 2001, president George W Bush kept Freeh on as FBI director. Freeh told the new president that Iran had masterminded the Khobar bombing, according to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and the Justice Department then began collaborating with Freeh on an indictment of the Saudi Hezbollah which implicated Iran in the Khobar bombing.
The indictment was announced on June 21, 2001 - Freeh's last day as FBI director.
Highly credible evidence soon showed, however, that the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, did indeed use torture and coercion to get detainees to tell the stories demanded by the Saudi regime - even in front of foreign observers - and that they did so to protect al-Qaeda from investigation by the United States.
Three car bombings in Riyadh in November 2000 that had resulted in the death of a British citizen were generally believed to have been the work of al-Qaeda. But four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian, had confessed to the bombings, and their confessions had been broadcast on Saudi television.
After being released in 2003, however, the Canadian citizen, William Sampson, made public his dramatic account of beatings administered by the Mabahith while being hung upside down, including blows which made his testicles swell to the size of oranges. Sampson said the Saudis told him from the beginning what they wanted him to confess to, repeating it over and over while the beatings continued, and refined the story over time, constantly adding new details.
Six weeks into the interrogation, after Sampson began to tell them what they wanted, they started videotaping his confession, using a wall chart to help him remember in detail the movements he was supposed to have made.
The Saudis even coached Sampson on what to say when he was visited by Canadian Embassy personnel, threatening him with further torture if he told the embassy officials the truth. When the embassy personnel came to talk with him, Sampson's two torturers were present for the entire interview, just as they were presumably present at the questioning of the Shi'ite detainees observed by the FBI team.
The other foreigners told similar stories of coerced confessions under torture. Sampson and the five foreigners were released only after a May 2003 suicide bombing by al-Qaeda on a Riyadh compound housing 900 expatriates forced Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef to acknowledge al-Qaeda as a terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defense lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.
Testifying before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees on October 9, 2002, he whitewashed the Saudi policy toward the FBI investigation. Omitting any mention of the Saudi deception over the explosives smuggling incident and refusal to allow the FBI to pursue essential investigatory tasks, Freeh suggested that the Saudis had done everything that could be expected of them.
"Fortunately, the FBI was able to forge an effective working relationship with the Saudi police and Interior Ministry," he said. Any "roadblock or legal obstacle" that "would occur", Freeh asserted, was because of the "marked difference between our legal and procedural systems".
Freeh paid tribute to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, as "critical in achieving the FBI's investigative objectives in the Khobar case" and suggested that any such temporary problems "were always solved" by Bandar's "personal intervention".
Freeh misrepresented the arrangement under which the FBI team had observed the interrogation as "making these witnesses directly available".
In an interview for a fawning biography of Prince Bandar, Freeh even went so far as to call the Saudi beheading of four jihadis who confessed to the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard bombing after refusing to allow the FBI to question them as "swift justice" on a "Saudi domestic matter".
The final chapter of Freeh's connection with Bandar and the Saudis, however, was still to come. In April 2009, Freeh appeared as Bandar's defense lawyer in a British court case in which Bandar was accused of illegally taking US$2 billion in graft on a Saudi-British arms deal.
In the context of Freeh's straightened financial situation and his very close relationship with Prince Bandar, this sequence of developments in Freeh's relationship with the Saudis, culminating in being put on Bandar's payroll, should have raised eyebrows in Washington.
With a wife and six children to support, Freeh had been far more vulnerable to Saudi blandishments than most senior administration officials. And Bandar had made no secret that he was willing to use the promise of financial benefits to influence US officials while they were still in office.
He once told an associate, according to a February 2002 article by Robert G Kaiser and David Ottaway of the Washington Post, "If the reputation ... builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."
Freeh declined to be interviewed for this series.
In light of the history of Freeh's relations with Bandar, his conduct of the investigation of Khobar Towers deserves new scrutiny. Freeh effectively shut down a probe of a terror bombing in which bin Laden was clearly implicated when the Saudis had refused to cooperate; he refused to pursue any investigation of a bin Laden role in the bombing; and he pushed a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing, despite the fact that it was tainted by the likelihood of torture.
The result of Freeh's blatant pro-Saudi bias was that bin Laden was allowed more years of unhindered freedom in which to plan terrorist actions against the US. Had Freeh not become an advocate of the interests of the regime whose representative in Washington eventually put him on his payroll, US policy would presumably have been focused like a laser on bin Laden and al-Qaeda two years earlier.
And perhaps the disinterest of the George W Bush administration's national security team toward al-Qaeda before 9/11 would have been impossible.
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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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