Gareth Porter
July 3, 2009 - Asia Times
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In March 1997, United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs "the first truly big break in the case": the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.
Hani al-Sayegh, then 28 years old, had arrived in Canada in August 1996 after having left Saudi Arabia, by his own account, in August 1995, for Iran and Syria. The Canadian government charged him with being a terrorist, based on claims by the Saudi regime.
In order to be transferred to the United States without facing deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty, al-Sayegh had to agree to a plea bargain under which he would admit to having proposed an attack on US personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.
In fact, the only thing al-Sayegh had actually admitted to, according to FBI sources, was having proposed an attack on one AWACS plane that had been turned over to the Saudi Air Force - a proposal he said had been rejected. Both before and after being brought to Washington, moreover, al-Sayegh steadfastly denied any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing.
Despite that consistent denial by al-Sayegh, a Washington Post story on April 14, 1997, quoted US and Saudi officials as saying that al-Sayegh had met two years earlier with senior Iranian intelligence officer Brigadier General Ahmad Sherifi and that Iran was the "organizing force" behind the Khobar bombing.
That story, leaked by officials supporting the Saudi version of the Khobar story, cited Canadian intercepts of al-Sayegh's phone conversations in Ottawa before his arrest as allegedly incriminating evidence.
The story leant further credence to the general belief in Washington that Iran had masterminded the bombing, mainly because US intelligence had observed the surveillance of US military and civilian sites in Saudi Arabia by Iranians and their Saudi allies in 1994 and 1995.
What al-Sayegh actually told FBI agents in a series of interviews in Ottawa and Washington, however, contradicted the leaked story, according to sources familiar with those interviews.
Al-Sayegh admitted having carried out the surveillance of one military site other than Khobar for the Iranians, but insisted that it was not to prepare for a possible terrorist bombing but to identify potential targets for Iranian retaliation in the event of a US attack on Iran.
His testimony was consistent with what ambassador Ron Neumann, who was director of the Office for Iran and Iraq in the State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs from 1991 through 1994, had been saying about the Iranian reconnaissance of US targets.
While most official analysts were ready to believe that Iran was plotting a terrorist attack against the United States, Neumann recalls that he had discerned a pattern in Iranian behavior: every time US-Iran tensions rose, there was an increase in Iranian reconnaissance of US diplomatic and military faculties.
"The pattern could be taken as hostile but it could equally have been defensive," says Neumann, meaning that the Iranians viewed such reconnaissance of possible US targets as part of their deterrent to a US attack.
Al-Sayegh would have been a strange choice for driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers. A frail man whose frequent asthma attacks repeatedly interrupted his interviews with the FBI, al-Sayegh recounted to investigators he had entered military training with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, but had been told by his IRGC handler after one particularly disastrous exercise that his asthma made him unfit for military operations.
FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, who was talking with the agents interviewing al-Sayegh that spring and summer, told al-Sayegh's immigration lawyer, Michael Wildes, that he was convinced al-Sayegh had not participated in the operation, according to notes in the diary Wildes kept on the case.
Al-Sayegh continued to deny either that he was involved or the Iranians had anything to do with Khobar, and as a result was deported to Saudi Arabia in 1999 - despite the widespread assumption within the FBI that he would be beheaded on his return.
Freeh had no case against the Iranians and their Saudi allies unless he could get access to the Saudi Shi'ite detainees. In the memoir My FBI, Freeh charged that president Bill Clinton refused to press Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for access to those prisoners and then asked him for a contribution to the future Clinton presidential library at a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in September 1998.
That account is disputed, however, by numerous Clinton administration officials. Freeh, who was not present, cites only "my sources", strongly suggesting that he got it from the self-interested Prince Bandar.
Freeh claimed that former president George HW Bush had then interceded with Abdullah at Freeh's request, resulting in a meeting between Freeh and Abdullah at Bandar's Virginia estate September 29, 1998. At that meeting, Abdullah offered to allow the FBI to submit questions to the detainees and observe the questions and answers from behind one-way glass.
But what Freeh left out of the story is that Abdullah's new offer came at a time when the Saudis felt a greater need to appease Washington on the Khobar Towers investigation than they had previously.
In May 1998, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had learned that Saudi intelligence had broken up an al-Qaeda plot to smuggle Sagger anti-tank missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia about a week before a scheduled visit to Saudi by vice president Al Gore and had not informed US intelligence about the incident.
Then, on August 7, 1998, the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania had been bombed 10 minutes apart. The CIA had quickly ascertained that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombings, with the result that US intelligence began to focus more on bin Laden's operations in Saudi Arabia.
Gore had met with Abdullah on September 24, and had pressed hard for access to an important al-Qaeda finance official, Madani al Tayyib, who had been detained by the Saudi government the previous year, but kept away from US intelligence.
The Saudi regime had long acted to keep the United States away from the bin Laden trail in Saudi Arabia. During the Afghan war, high-ranking Saudi officials, including interior minister Prince Nayef himself, had worked closely with bin Laden. And those ties had apparently continued even after the Saudi government revoked bin Laden's citizenship, froze his assets, and began cracking down on some anti-government Islamic extremists in 1994.
Evidence soon appeared that the regime had allowed Saudi supporters of bin Laden to finance his operations through Saudi charities, while encouraging bin Laden to focus on the US military rather than the regime.
Investigators from the 9/11 Commission later learned that, after bin Laden's move from Sudan to Afghanistan in May 1996, a delegation of Saudi officials had asked top Taliban leaders to tell bin Laden that if he didn't attack the regime, "recognition will follow".
Meanwhile, Nayef was resisting CIA requests for bin Laden's birth certificate, passport and bank records.
The CIA had been sharing its own intelligence on bin Laden with the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, including copies of National Security Agency interceptions of the cell phone conversations of suspected al-Qaeda officials. Then the militants suddenly stopped using their cell phones, indicating they had been tipped off by the Mabahith.
In early 1997, the CIA's bin Laden station even issued a memorandum for CIA director George Tenet, who was about to travel to Saudi Arabia, identifying Saudi intelligence as a "hostile service".
By late September 1998, the Saudi regime was feeling the heat from the Clinton administration for its failure to cooperate on bin Laden's operations in Saudi Arabia. Abdullah's proposal was a way to demonstrate cooperation on terrorism while helping Freeh promote the Saudi line on the Khobar Towers.
FBI ignored evidence of bin Laden
Bin Laden had made no secret of his intention to attack the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. He had been calling for such attacks to drive it from the country since his first fatwa calling for jihad against Western "occupation" of Islamic lands in early 1992.
On July 11, 1995, he had written an "Open Letter" to King Fahd advocating a campaign of guerilla attacks to drive US military forces out of the kingdom.
Bin Laden's al-Qaeda began carrying out that campaign later that same year. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb destroyed the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard (OPM SANG) in Riyadh, killing five US airmen and wounding 34.
The confessions of the four jihadis from the Afghan war to the bombing, which were broadcast on Saudi television, said they had been inspired by bin Laden, and one of them referred to a camp in Afghanistan which was associated with bin Laden.
"It was a backhanded reference to bin Laden," says veteran FBI agent Dan Coleman.
The US Embassy in Riyadh immediately requested that the FBI be allowed to interrogate the suspects as soon as their arrests were announced in April. But the Saudis never responded to the request, and on May 31, the embassy was informed only an hour and half before that the four suspects would be beheaded.
When the bomb exploded at Khobar Towers on June 25, 1996, Scott Erskine, the agent in charge of the Riyadh bombing investigation, was about to return to the United States after another frustrating meeting in which Saudi officials were not forthcoming about whom they were going to prosecute.
When FBI Director Freeh visited Khobar a few days after the bombing, he was told not to expect any more information on the Riyadh bombing.
Instead of insisting that the Clinton administration put more pressure on the Saudis to cooperate on the possibility of links between the two bombings, Freeh quietly decided to drop the investigation of the Riyadh bombing entirely. The case was put on "inactive" status, according to two former FBI officials, meaning that no more actions were to be taken, even though it had not been formally closed.
Bin Laden made it more difficult to ignore his role, however, by publicly claiming responsibility for both the Riyadh and Khobar bombings. In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive US soldiers out of the kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al-Quds al-Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, "The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar."
And in an interview published in the same newspaper on November 29, 1996, he was asked why there had been no further operations along the lines of the Khobar operation. "The military are aware that preparations for major operations require time, in contrast with small operations," said bin Laden.
He then linked the two bombings in Saudi Arabia explicitly as signals to the United States from his organization: "We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible US decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and US forces," said bin Laden, "but it seems that they did not understand the signal."
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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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