Against All Enemies (20 page)

After a CSG meeting to coordinate relief efforts, I met with the NSC staff counterterrorism team. We went over every CIA, NSA, Defense, and State Department report on threats in Saudi Arabia for the past two years. A few dozen reports, culled from thousands on file, told a clear story. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp's Qods Force had created Hezbollah groups in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. They had secretly recruited terrorists and sent them off for training in Iran and then in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia had learned of this activity and protested to Iran. Iran had denied the allegation. One night, the Saudi border guards were using a bomb-sniffing dog suggested by the United States that noticed something in a car at a customs post. The car was found to have a load of sophisticated plastic explosives. The ensuing Saudi interrogation and investigation led to arrests of Hezbollah operatives in the Kingdom and established that the car was operated by Saudi Hezbollah and originated at a camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley. The camp was nominally run by a Saudi named Mugassal, but he worked for the Qods Force, the Iranian Special Forces. The bomb was intended for an attack on a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis had told us none of this. They had quietly asked the Syrians to close the Hezbollah camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, which was under Syrian control, and to hand over the Saudi Hezbollah terrorists. Syria had professed ignorance.

The day after the Khobar attack, we presented Tony Lake with a detailed NSC Staff report placing the blame on Iran's Qods Force and their front, Saudi Hezbollah. Lake believed us and wondered why CIA had not reached the same conclusion. He sent the report to CIA Director John Deutch, who replied only that ours was one of many theories.

At the FBI, Director Louis Freeh responded eagerly to the White House request for an FBI investigation. It was one of the few times Freeh did anything eagerly that the White House had asked him to do. Freeh had told senior FBI officers that the White House staff were all “politicals” who could not be trusted. Many of his senior officers, however, had been working with me and other career national security officials in the White House for years on sensitive counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and anti-narcotics activities. They continued to do so, while admitting that they were no longer telling Freeh about all their meetings at the White House complex.

For Freeh, who had worked on narcotics and organized crime cases in New York, international affairs was a new arena. Soon after the Khobar attack, Freeh was sought out by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. Bandar charmed Freeh at frequent meetings at the Saudi's Virginia estates. Bandar facilitated meetings in Saudi Arabia for Freeh, who went there to coordinate the investigation personally. John O'Neill accompanied Freeh to the Kingdom. O'Neill told me he was struck by the contrast between the fawning protocol the Saudis showed to Freeh and their mendacity whenever the conversation got around to the investigation. Freeh, according to O'Neill, did not seem to detect the duplicity.

Behind the glad hand, the Saudis had no intention of cooperating with the FBI. The attack had revealed an internal vulnerability in the Kingdom, the armed opposition of Shi'a Muslims from the Eastern Province. The Saudis did not want that embarrassment publicly revealed. Saudi Interior Minister Nayef denied the FBI access to evidence and witnesses. When the Saudis traced the attack back to Mugassal and Iran, they arrested some of the Saudi Hezbollah group still in the country, but denied the FBI access to the prisoners and refused to admit to the FBI that the attack was orchestrated by Iran. Nayef and others in the royal family worried about what the U.S. would do with that information.

Almost a year after the attack, the Saudis did convey one interesting fact. They claimed that they had traced a member of the terrorist cell to Canada. They asked that the United States intervene with the Canadians to return the suspect to Saudi Arabia. I thought otherwise, suggesting to the CSG that we put the suspect, Hani el-Sayegh, under surveillance to see whom he met with, whom he talked to. Unfortunately our agreements with Canada prohibited us from unilateral operations there. FBI, therefore, requested Canadian surveillance. After a short time, the Canadians complained that they did not have the staff or the funds to continue constant surveillance.

Louis Freeh had a solution.

He proposed confronting Sayegh and soliciting his cooperation in exchange for a light sentence. That was the way Freeh had handled organized crime cases, rolling up the gang by “flipping” lower-level members, getting them to implicate their bosses in exchange for leniency. Freeh asked if the White House and State Department would go along with Sayegh testifying before a grand jury even if the result might be indictments of Iranian officials. The NSC Principals Committee met and agreed that we should indict whoever we had evidence against, including Iranian government officials.

I didn't think Freeh's plan would work with Sayegh and asked the director, “Why should he agree to go to jail when we have no evidence against him? If we bring him here, you will have to release him and he can walk out onto the streets in the U.S. a free man.”

I could not convince Freeh, who proceeded with the confrontation of Sayegh. When detained, the Saudi talked freely to the Canadian authorities and FBI in Canada. He admitted that the Khobar attack was directed by the Saudi Hezbollah leader, Mugassal, and the Iranian Qods Force. Surprisingly, Sayegh agreed to come to the United States and testify before a grand jury. He was told that he would be sentenced to prison for his role in anti-U.S. terrorism, but he would be given a light sentence. Sayegh agreed to the bargain and was trundled off.

Yet once in the United States, Sayegh refused to cooperate and sought political asylum, noting that he would be tortured and then decapitated if he were returned to Saudi Arabia. Of course, he would have been decapitated for killing Americans, but nonetheless his asylum request was placed into the State Department and Justice Department systems for review. When asked about the attack on Khobar and the role of Iran, he clammed up. His government-appointed lawyer moved for his release, pending the asylum review. The FBI had no evidence against him. Sayegh was about to walk out the door of a federal building onto the streets of the United States. Then Freeh came up with an idea that showed real creativity. He ordered Sayegh detained on the grounds that he was in the United States illegally, even though it was the FBI that had brought him in.

Two years later, in 1999, Sayegh was placed into Saudi custody, without ever having testified before a grand jury or having given one bit of evidence from the time he stepped foot in the United States. FBI agents accompanied him to Saudi Arabia, reminding him throughout the flight that it was not too late to turn the plane around if he would testify. Sayegh ignored them.

During the two years of Sayegh's detention in the United States, Freeh sought to understand from Prince Bandar why the FBI was not getting better cooperation from the Saudi government. I learned that Bandar had explained to Freeh that the White House did not want the Saudis to cooperate with Freeh. Clinton, Bandar claimed, did not want the evidence that Iran had bombed an American Air Force base; Clinton did not want to go to war with Iran. Freeh believed it. It fit with his own dim view of the President, the man to whom he owed his rapid elevation from a low-level federal job in New York. In the White House, we heard that Freeh began to repeat Bandar's explanation for the failed Khobar investigation, telling Congressmen and reporters of the supposed Clinton cover-up.

Freeh should have been spending his time fixing the mess that the FBI had become, an organization of fifty-six princedoms (the fifty-six very independent field offices) without any modern information technology to support them. He might have spent some time hunting for terrorists in the United States, where al Qaeda and its affiliates had put down roots, where many terrorist organizations were illegally raising money. Instead, he reportedly chose to be chief investigator in high-profiles cases like Khobar, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the possible Chinese espionage at our nuclear labs. In all of those cases, his personal involvement appeared to contribute to the cases going down dark alleys, empty wells. His back channels to Republicans in the Congress and to supporters in the media made it impossible for the President to dismiss him without running the risk of making him a martyr of the Republican Right and his firing a cause célèbre.

In actuality, Clinton had been pursuing the opposite path to what Freeh imagined. In discussions with Saudi officials, the U.S. made very clear at presidential direction that there must be full cooperation, not the rapid decapitation of suspects as had been done in the Riyadh case. Having been advised that the Saudis were reluctant to see the United States start another war in the Persian Gulf by retaliating against Iran, we assured the Saudi leadership that there would be no surprises, that the U.S. would consult fully with the Saudis before responding to whatever it learned about those behind the attack. Clinton was promised that Saudi Arabia would tell us all it knew and cooperate fully with the FBI. They proceeded to do the exact opposite.

Some in the Saudi royal family, like Bandar's father, Minister of Defense Sultan, reportedly welcomed the possibility of a U.S. war with Iran, if America could remove the Tehran regime. Bandar, in private talks with senior American officials in 1996 and 1997, suggested that all that was stopping the Saudis from implicating Iran was the fear that the American retaliation would be halfhearted. If the U.S. could promise a full-scale fight to the finish, then the Kingdom would probably tell all that it knew about the Iranian role in the Khobar attack. Sandy Berger told Bandar that the United States could not promise what it would do on the basis of evidence it had not seen.

Others in the Saudi royal family thought any war with Iran would end up with a Pyrrhic victory. The U.S.-led war with Iraq had almost bankrupted the oil-rich Saudis. They had spent so much money subsidizing U.S. and coalition forces and then buying more arms from America that they had few funds left for anything else and were falling behind in payments owed to foreign suppliers. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia had been destabilizing. Another war would bring the Americans back in large numbers. The Crown Prince was reportedly of this school of thought. With the King largely incapacitated, Crown Prince Abdullah was making the decisions. Without telling the United States, he entered into talks with Iran.

After many months, what was agreed between the Saudi and Iranian leadership was essentially this: Iran would not sponsor or support terrorism in Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia would not permit the United States to launch attacks on Iran from the Kingdom.

The White House pressure on the Saudis to cooperate in the investigation continued over three years, with letters from the President and demarches by National Security Advisors Lake and Berger. Vice President Gore demonstrated his famous temper in one such meeting, pounding on the table and asking a Saudi prince what sort of country hid the identity of people who had killed American military personnel stationed in that country defending it and its royal family.

When enough time had passed to convince the Saudis that America had cooled down and was not about to bomb Iran, the FBI was finally granted access to the suspects. Five years after the bombing, indictments were handed down by a U.S. grand jury.

While Freeh had been pursuing the Saudis, the White House had been preparing for war. We had convinced Tony Lake that Iran launched the Khobar attack, and CIA soon agreed and suggested that further Iranian-sponsored terrorism against the U.S. was likely. Clinton told us that if it came to using force against Iran, “I don't want any pissant half-measures.” Lake convened what he called the Small Group, CIA Director Deutch, Defense Secretary William Perry, Secretary of State Christopher, and the Vice President's National Security Advisor, Leon Feurth, to examine options.

Separately, Lake sent his deputy, Sandy Berger, and me to see Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili. The Joint Chiefs had made a practice of never showing their war plans to civilians, despite being hectored to do so over the years by various Pentagon civilians. I knew the number of the war plan for Iran and asked Lake to call Shali and ask him to brief us on that plan.

John Shalikashvili was an unlikely person to be the senior American military officer. Born in Poland to a family from Soviet Georgia, he still had an accent. Out of uniform, he looked like a kindly pediatrician. I had first heard his name when, in 1991, as Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, I was asked to set up a meeting between a U.S. commander and an Iraqi commander, in order to tell the Iraqis to clear out of northern Iraq. U.S. forces were about to intervene to save the starving Kurds, who were fleeing into snow-covered mountains in Turkey. Looking at a large, detailed map of northern Iraq, I found a town near the Turkish border named Zakho.

“Tell the U.S. mission at the U.N. to get the Iraqi ambassador. Tell him to have a flag rank officer meet a U.S. general in, let's see, how about Zakho at noon the day after tomorrow,” I instructed my executive officer, Martin Wellington. “Then tell the Pentagon to send a U.S. general to Zakho.”

Wellington returned in a few hours, saying “The Iraqis want to know where in Zakho they are supposed to meet Shalikashvili?”

“Meet who? Are the Russians trying to get involved?” I asked Wellington, who assured me that was the name of an American general. Shali went on to perform heroically in rescuing the Kurds and moving them safely back from Turkey to their homes in Iraq. When it came time to replace Colin Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1993, many of us urged the selection of Shali. Unlike Powell, who had bristled at the use of the U.S. military in minor engagements, Shali had thought there was a role for the military in creating stability in situations short of all-out war.