Authors: Matthew Levitt
The end of the Iran-Iraq War in August 1988 dimmed the hopes of Gulf Shi’a that an Iranian victory over Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni government would liberate Iraq’s majority Shi’a population and lead to similar redemptions of Shi’a enclaves throughout the Gulf. This, combined with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini a year later in June 1989 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year after that led to a slow improvement in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Still, Iran continued to support the anti-Saudi propaganda efforts of Saudi Shi’a groups, including Saudi Hezbollah.
The crackdowns on Saudi Hezbollah operatives at home and abroad by Saudi security services likely helped prompt the decline of violent attacks by the group. The group continued to attempt several attacks that were thwarted, including an aborted plot to blow up a Saudi Airlines plane flying from Islamabad to Riyadh.
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Saudi Hezbollah also used this time to recruit additional operatives and send them abroad for training in Iran and Lebanon—including people who would later participate in the conspiracy to bomb Khobar Towers.
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Ties among Iran’s various proxy groups, especially Lebanese and Saudi Hezbollah, grew stronger at this time. For example, in fall 1989 a series of coordinated speeches was issued by Lebanese Hezbollah and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) praising “the four martyrs” of Saudi Hezbollah beheaded a year earlier. Lebanese Hezbollah and SCIRI officials issued their statements at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine outside Damascus, while the future leader of Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, made his speech in Qom, Iran. This and meetings between leaders of Lebanese and Saudi Hezbollah and senior Iranian officials “made clear that Hizbullah al-Hijaz was very well connected to and supported by Iran and Lebanese Hizbullah, among others.”
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Several years later, in 1993, the Saudi government and leaders of some Saudi Shi’a opposition groups came to an agreement by which the Shi’a groups would stop their activities in opposition to the regime—especially the publication of anti-regime books and magazines by émigré activists in London and elsewhere outside the kingdom—in return for general amnesty and a government pledge to discuss the grievances of the Shi’a in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh released Shi’a political prisoners, some of whom had been incarcerated since the 1980s, and allowed hundreds of Shi’a exiles to return to Saudi Arabia.
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Saudi Hezbollah, however, rejected the agreement. The group “vowed to continue on the path of jihad and revolution and invoked the example of the four martyrs of 1988.”
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That year the head of Saudi Hezbollah’s military wing directed several operatives to initiate surveillance of Americans in Saudi Arabia, including at the US embassy in Riyadh.
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Nonetheless, Saudi Hezbollah members were among the released political prisoners and former exiles returning to their homes in the country’s Eastern Province in 1993 and 1994.
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Some of these activists now focused on religious and social activities, while others were deeply involved in terrorist activity such as recruiting operatives, training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, and conducting surveillance of the US embassy and American citizens in Saudi Arabia for possible targeting.
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Consider the following Canadian assessment:
Although it is a distinct entity, Saudi Hizballah receives much support and assistance from Hizballah. For example, Lebanese Hizballah train fundamentalist Saudi Arabian Shiites of the Saudi Hizballah at their camps in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. The camps are used to teach advanced techniques such as surveillance and counter-surveillance, methods of secure electronic communications, and the production of false identification documents. They also provide instruction in foreign languages, the use of small arms, methods of border infiltration, and the making of car bombs.
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US intelligence reports echoed the Canadian finding, suggesting that the IRGC’s Lebanon contingent provided unspecified training to “Shia oppositionists” from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. According to other, more specific intelligence reporting, sixteen Saudi Shi’a attended a two-month military training course in Lebanon in summer 1995.
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Such intelligence reports align with the testimony of a former CIA official who stated that planning for the Khobar Towers attack began around 1994, including planning meetings likely held in Tehran and operational meetings held at the Iranian embassy in Damascus. It was in 1994, according to this account, that the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, gave the order for the attack on the Khobar Towers complex.
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While planning the attack, Shi’a extremists continued to carry out other plots, including the hijacking of a Saudi Airlines flight, also in 1994.
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Iran’s support for terrorism was born with the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the new clerical regime’s belief that it had a religious obligation to export the revolution. Writing in 1986, the CIA assessed that this obligation included the edict “to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.” But the report continued, “Terrorism is also used to further Iranian national interests.”
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In the early 1990s these interests dictated an increase in operational activities in the Gulf. Violence by Shi’a extremists was primarily the consequence of Iran’s geopolitical calculus and its continued enmity toward Sunni Gulf states.
The dominance of radical elements within the Iranian clerical leadership translated into significant Iranian hostility toward the West and little chance more pragmatic leaders would come to the fore. Creating tensions abroad shifted popular attention away from domestic problems, while the asymmetry of supporting terrorism provided Tehran with a potent weapon at a time when its military and economy were weak.
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Tensions were so high at the time over the downing of Iran Air flight 655 that the CIA warned of the possibility that individual Hezbollah operatives could mobilize off-the-shelf operational planning and “freelance an operation” even without direction from Iranian or Hezbollah leaders.
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Underlying Iranian grievances made tensions with the West all the more acute. Iran was keen to drive US and Western influence from the Middle East, mitigate Western power projection in the region (which had increased significantly following Operation Desert Storm and the enforcement of a no-fly zone over southern
Iraq), punish the Saudis and other Gulf regimes for supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, and eliminate individuals and undermine governments opposed to the clerical regime in Tehran.
All these factors led Iran to proactively pursue terrorist operations targeting the United States in the region, especially Saudi Arabia. The use of non-Iranian proxies to execute Iranian-inspired attacks was not new. A 1988 CIA report stressed that Iran saw benefit in using non-Iranian proxy groups to carry out its attacks probably because this approach “provides access to strategic targets as well as the deniability needed to prevent retaliation.”
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To this end Tehran has traditionally seen Hezbollah as a strategic tool with which to project power without having to contend with the consequences of such activities. Thus the Khobar Towers indictment explains in its opening paragraph that beginning sometime in the 1980s, Hezbollah was the name used by several related terrorist groups operating in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Bahrain, among other places. “The Hizballah organizations,” it explained, “were inspired, supported, and directed by elements of the Iranian government.”
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Not only were Lebanese and Saudi Hezbollah inspired by the same pan-Shi’a, pro-Iranian ideology, both organizations “owe allegiance to Iran’s supreme religious leader…. And that process is a formal oath taking process.”
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Ultimately, the FBI would conclude that the Khobar attack was planned, organized, and sponsored by Iran and executed by Saudi Hezbollah operatives. Beyond the evidence presented in the public indictment of the conspirators, intelligence intercepts reportedly also pointed to Iran’s role in directing the attack.
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According to former FBI deputy director for counterterrorism Dale Watson, evidence the FBI collected to determine Saudi Hezbollah carried out the attack at Iran’s behest included not only forensics and the statements of detained conspirators but also “a lot of other types of information that I’m not at liberty to discuss.” According to Watson, whose tenure at the FBI spanned twenty-four years and included a stint as chief of the Iran-Hezbollah unit at FBI headquarters, Hezbollah does not carry out terrorist attacks internationally on its own. “It must be sanctioned, it must be ordered, and it must be approved and somebody has to fund it,” Watson noted in explaining Iran’s role in the attack.
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According to Bruce Tefft, a twenty-year CIA veteran who helped set up the CIA’s Counterterrorism Bureau in 1985, the Khobar Towers attack was planned and overseen by Iran’s IRGC and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) “acting on the orders of the Supreme Leader of Iran.”
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Ironically, in recruiting a network of radical Saudi Shi’a to bomb American soldiers stationed at Khobar Towers, Iran targeted the UN-mandated mission tasked with protecting the Shi’a of southern Iraq from the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iran’s sworn enemy. From this vantage point, the pan-Shi’a ideology that bound Iranian Qods Force commanders and Saudi Hezbollah operatives was tied more to the decidedly Iranian national interest of driving US forces out of the Gulf than those of the greater Shi’a community.
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While Iran was the driving force behind the Khobar operation, it also directed a number of other terrorist organizations using the name Hezbollah in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Bahrain, among other places.
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Hezbollah, a 1994 FBI report would note,
“is particularly interested in recruiting non-Lebanese Shiites,” with members from a variety of countries but especially Iraq and Iran.
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By the time the CIA penned its 1992 report, several of the Khobar Towers plotters had already joined Saudi Hezbollah and undergone terrorist training in Iran and Lebanon. For example, in 1989 or 1990, Saed al-Bahar and Ali al-Houri received military training in Iran; around 1989, Abdallah al-Jarash went to Lebanon in a Mercedes supplied by the Iranian embassy in Damascus to receive military training from Hezbollah.
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Along with Saudi Hezbollah leader Ahmed al-Mughassil, several other members recruited young Saudi Shi’a to join Saudi Hezbollah. Mughassil also arranged for the recruits to receive training in Iran and Lebanon, directed them to conduct surveillance of potential targets, and planned and supervised attacks, according to the US indictment. Ali al-Houri, Hani al-Sayegh, and Ibrahim al-Yacoub were all active recruiters as well. Al-Houri was not only a “major recruiter” for Hezbollah but also the group’s liaison to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which was a key logistics and support hub for Saudi Hezbollah members traveling to and from Lebanon. Al-Sayegh, a fluent Farsi speaker who “enjoyed an unusually close association with certain military elements of the Iranian government,” helped arrange new recruits’ military training at Hezbollah camps in Lebanon and Iran. Al-Yacoub was both a recruiter and a liaison between Saudi Hezbollah and “the Lebanese and Iranian Hizballah organizations.”
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Five of the Khobar Towers conspirators were recruited in Damascus, most at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine, over a period from the late 1980s to around 1992. Mughassil, Yacoub, Houri, and Sayegh were among the people they met in Damascus. When they recruited Abdallah al-Jarash there, Jarash was informed that the group’s goal was “to target foreign interests, American in particular, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.” Mustafa al-Qassab, in contrast, traveled to Iran to meet Mughassil sometime in the late 1980s, after which he joined the group. Saleh Ramadan and Mustafa Mu’alem were recruited back home in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia by Ali al-Marhoun—one of the operatives recruited at the Damascus shrine.
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Such activity continued at full pace in the years leading up to the Khobar Towers attack. In 1995, Saudi authorities arrested “a large number” of Saudi Shi’a in the Eastern Province suspected of being involved in a series of small-scale explosions and shootings in Bahrain that July.
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The same senior Iranian officials reportedly were responsible for directing both the disturbances in Bahrain and the Khobar Towers attack, which was then in the making.
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Also in 1995, the CIA reported, Iranian agents engaged in intentionally blatant surveillance of US interests in Kuwait—and elsewhere in Asia and Europe—sometimes using Iranian diplomatic vehicles.
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According to former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, US intelligence reports documented how between 1994 and 1996 the IRGC Qods Force fostered Hezbollah-style groups in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia and sent terrorists for training in Iran and Lebanon.
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During this same time period, other reports note, Tehran established an extensive network of terrorist training camps in Iran under the orders of President Rafsanjani. More than 5,000 militants reportedly passed through these camps a year. Each
camp was reportedly established to fill a different terrorist niche. The Abyek camp at Qasvim was used for training would-be assassins, and the Nahavand camp in Hamadan was used by Lebanese Hezbollah. The Imam Ali training camp in east Tehran, meanwhile, was said to be the largest of some eleven training camps, and was the one used by Saudi Hezbollah.
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Such training enabled Iran to strike at American interests through proxies without being directly implicated in the attacks. Writing in 1992, the CIA assessed that Iran “would be likely to support Hizballah’s efforts to retaliate against the United States,” dependent on its ability to maintain probable deniability.
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