Authors: Matthew Levitt
Mughniyeh was also reportedly in contact with Saudi Hezbollah throughout the 1990s through his deputy Talal Hamiyeh.
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Stemming from a powerful Bekaa Valley clan, Hamiyeh is said to have partnered with Mughniyeh in the 1980s during the early days of Hezbollah kidnappings, and even served as point man for negotiating the release of some hostages held in Lebanon.
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Implicated in the 1992 and 1994 Hezbollah bombings in Buenos Aires, he succeeded Mughniyeh as head of Hezbollah’s IJO after the latter’s February 2008 assassination.
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Briefed in Beirut on the intelligence his cell collected on Khobar Towers through months of surveillance, al-Mughassil traveled in January or February 1996 to Qatif, not far from Dhahran and Khobar Towers, where he instructed one of his operatives to find places to stockpile and hide their explosives. Sites were apparently identified rather quickly, because sometime around February Ramadan returned to Beirut at al-Mughassil’s direction and drove back to Saudi Arabia in a car stuffed with hidden explosives.
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Though authorities were unaware of this successful smuggling run, they did have indications that terrorists were smuggling explosives. In March, US authorities
came by unconfirmed intelligence indicating that “a large quantity of explosives was to be smuggled into Saudi Arabia during the Hajj,” which ran from mid-April to mid-May that year.
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In a briefing they received on April 12, General Schwalier and key members of his staff were told the current threat included reports of “a large quantity of explosives destined for coalition military targets with the potential for use in a bombing attack.” This information, however, was deemed too sensitive to be released down the chain of command, making it largely useless. No changes were made to the existing security posture at the base as a result of this briefing.
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When he arrived in Qatif, Ramadan delivered the car to an unknown man whose face was veiled.
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Most of the cell members knew one another. This, plus the fact that a Lebanese Hezbollah operative and bomb maker referred to in the US Khobar Towers indictment as John Doe played a key role in constructing the truck bomb, suggests the mysteriously veiled recipient of the explosives delivered from Lebanon may have been the Lebanese Hezbollah bomb maker himself.
But the following month Hezbollah suffered a serious operational setback. Having passed al-Mughassil’s test run the previous June, al-Alawe was summoned back to Beirut in March 1996 and given the keys to a car stuffed with hidden explosives. Al-Alawe drove the car through Syria and Jordan, arriving at the al-Haditha crossing point on the Jordanian-Saudi border on March 28. But whereas Ramadan was able to smuggle explosives across the border in his earlier run, al-Alawe was arrested on the spot when Saudi border guards inspecting his car discovered thirty-eight kilograms of plastic explosives expertly hidden within its engine compartment. This in turn led to the arrests over three days in early April of al-Marhoun, al-Mu’alem, and Ramadan.
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Suddenly, al-Mughassil found himself without his key operatives and facing the prospect that some elements of the operation may be compromised. Undeterred, al-Mughassil quickly found replacements for his four detained operatives and assumed a hands-on role himself to see the operation through.
Sometime in late April or early May, al-Mughassil returned to Saudi Arabia to personally assemble a new hit squad. Traveling on a false passport and under the cover of a pilgrim on Hajj, he appeared unannounced at Abdallah al-Jarash’s home in Qatif on May 1. Al-Mughassil briefed al-Jarash on the Khobar Towers bomb plot and on the arrests of the four cell members, and asked for his help executing the attack. Al-Mughassil must have assumed al-Jarash would answer in the affirmative, because before leaving he provided al-Jarash with a forged Iranian passport that must have been prepared in advance and told him to “be ready for a call to action at any time.”
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Assuming the authorities were broadening their investigation after the arrests of his operatives, al-Mughassil again showed up unannounced at another cell member’s home. Three days after visiting al-Jarash, he knocked on Hussein al-Mughis’s door and, after recruiting him to the operation and briefing him on the plan, left him a timing device to hide at his home. At least twice in the months leading up to the Khobar bombing, another Saudi Hezbollah cell member, Ali al-Houri, turned up at al-Mughis’s home seeking help to hide several fifty-kilogram bags and paint
cans filled with explosives at sites around Qatif. Then, with just about three weeks to go until the planned attack, al-Mughassil and the unnamed Lebanese Hezbollah operative (John Doe) who arrived to help assemble the bomb moved into al-Mughis’s home in Qatif.
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Al-Mughassil’s heightened concern for operational security was well warranted. Reporting in the days right after the attack, the CIA would note that following the March arrests the Saudis quickly determined that al-Mughassil directed the explosives smuggling operation based on information obtained from the interrogation of the detained Hezbollah operatives. At first the Saudis thought he had fled to Iran, given their information showing he held Lebanese and possibly Iranian passports. Subsequent information, however, suggested he was in Syria and Lebanon. “Riyadh,” the CIA noted, “has been seeking Syrian assistance in extraditing Mughassil from Lebanon since at least April for questioning about the shipment of explosives to the kingdom.”
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These efforts to secure Syrian counterterrorism cooperation failed, as they would again when redoubled after the Khobar Towers bombing.
Meanwhile, the plot continued apace. Using stolen identification, the cell purchased a tanker truck from a Saudi car dealership for about 75,000 Saudi Riyals, or some $20,000. The cell then spent two weeks leading up to the attack converting the tanker into a massive truck bomb at a farm in the Qatif area. Al-Mughassil was part of the team at the farm, along with al-Houri, al-Sayegh, al-Qassab, and the Lebanese Hezbollah operative, John Doe. Al-Mughis and al-Jarash came and went, with al-Mughis retrieving the timing device he was given and the explosives he helped hide and al-Jarash supplying the tools and wiring for the truck bomb assembly. The explosives were concealed within the gasoline tanker truck such that they would be unseen even if the truck were stopped and inspected. Had someone opened the hatch atop the tanker, he would have seen what appeared to be a tanker full of gasoline. In fact, John Doe and his crew had secured a fifty-gallon drum to the inside of the full 20,000-gallon tanker. But beneath the gasoline-filled drum, the rest of the tanker was filled with at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives. Mughassil’s ambitions did not end there: as he and his operatives built the truck bomb for the Khobar attack, al-Mughassil discussed plans for an additional attack, this one targeting the US consulate in Dhahran.
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With the operational details attended to, several of the conspirators met at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine in Damascus. The purpose of the meeting, held sometime around June 7–17, was to confer with the senior leadership of Saudi Hezbollah, including the group’s leader, Abdel Karim al-Nasser, and al-Mughassil, the group’s military chief. Also present were al-Houri, al-Yacoub, al-Sayegh, al-Qassab, and other senior Saudi Hezbollah leaders. Al-Nasser, the boss, presided over the meeting, reviewing details of the bombing plot and making clear to all that al-Mughassil was running the operation.
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According to Bruce Tefft, a former CIA official, other operational meetings also occurred in Damascus, including some at the Iranian embassy there. The Iranian mastermind of the Khobar plot, IRGC brigadier general Ahmed Sharifi, oversaw much of the operation out of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, according to Tefft. Within months of the attack, new intelligence reports
revealed the role of “an Iranian intelligence officer who goes by various code names, including ‘Sherifi’ and ‘Abu Jalal,’ [who] acted as a liaison between Teheran and Saudi Shiites in Lebanon.”
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According to Tefft, “By the time [the plot] advanced far enough to the stage where they were actually recruiting individuals to participate in the attack, and passing out false passports and funds, those in the meetings with the conspirators, the people who executed the attack, took place out of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria.”
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The case of Jaafar Chueikhat, a Saudi citizen and bombing suspect thought to be hiding in Syria after the attack, was a particular sticking point. Saudi officials long suspected Chueikhat of involvement in the transport of the explosives used in the Khobar bombing from the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon to Saudi Arabia. Saudi authorities tracked Chueikhat from Kuwait to Egypt to Syria after the bombing, and asked the Syrians to arrest him. Chueikhat, the Syrians insisted, had already fled to Iran. The Syrians later arrested him, after he supposedly returned to Syria from Iran. But Chueikhat committed suicide while in a Syrian prison, according to Syrian officials. Chueikhat’s death occurred under mysterious circumstances, however, just a day before Saudi investigators were scheduled to question him for the first time.
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When US officials pressed the Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Sharaa, to look into the matter of Chueikhat’s death, Sharaa lost his temper and insisted Syria was not involved in the attack in Dhahran or any other acts of terrorism. In a terse comment to the press, a senior US administration official said, “We are not satisfied with what we learned and continue to press the case.”
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Hani al-Sayegh spent significant time in Syria in the years leading up to the bombing, and would later insist to Canadian investigators and reporters that he could not have been involved in the bombing because he lived in Syria the two years before coming to Canada in August 1996. Stamps in his passport, he maintained, revealed he was in Syria, not Saudi Arabia, at the time of the bombing.
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Investigators were unconvinced, however, given that Iran provided cell members with false passports. Confessions from his co-conspirators and intercepted telephone conversations convinced Canadian, American, and Saudi officials that al-Sayegh played a key role in the bombing and had maintained contact with Iranian officials—both in Iran and Canada—since the attack. For example, while in Canada, al-Sayegh talked with his wife in Saudi Arabia and, speaking in Farsi, with Iranian officials in Iran. “In these conversations he makes oblique references that suggest a possible involvement in the Dhahran bombing, and he intimates that some of his cohorts fled at one time to Iran.”
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Whether the Syrian government played some role in the attack, such as knowingly providing safe haven to Saudi Hezbollah operatives before and after the attack, remains an open question. For example, in the months after the attack, reports emerged that Saudi Hezbollah official Husayn bin Mubarak was holding court in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was firmly under Syrian control, publicly receiving Saudi Hezbollah members who escaped Saudi Arabia and made their way to Lebanon via Iran.
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What is known is that a week after the go-ahead meeting in Damascus, al-Mughassil and the members of his cell had returned to Saudi Arabia and were ready to execute the attack. On the evening of attack they met at the farm in
Qatif, about five miles from Khobar Towers, to review final preparations. Present at this meeting were only the members of the actual operational unit, including al-Mughassil, al-Houri, al-Sayegh, al-Qassab, al-Jarash, and al-Mughis. They waited at the farm, the truck bomb ready to go, until dark.
Hani al-Sayegh left the farm first, shortly before 10
PM
. Driving a Datsun, with al-Jarash in the passenger seat, al-Sayegh pulled into the parking lot adjoining Building 131 at Khobar Towers and parked in the far corner. Serving as scouts, al-Sayegh and al-Jarash scanned the area for patrols or anything else that might disrupt their attack. Having conducted extensive surveillance of the site, they likely expected no such interruptions. The use of a scout vehicle, for its part, indicated the professional training the perpetrators received leading up to the attack. A white Chevrolet Caprice sedan entered the lot next. Al-Mughis had borrowed this car from an acquaintance, who likely had no idea his car would serve as the getaway for the perpetrators of a massive terrorist bombing. On their signal, the truck bomb entered, driven by al-Mughassil himself with al-Houri in the passenger seat. They backed up the truck to the fence in front of Building 131, then jumped into the back seat of the waiting getaway car, which drove away, followed by the lookouts in the signal car. Within minutes, the bomb exploded.
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For reasons unknown, al-Jarash and al-Mughis returned home to Qatif. The remaining members of the cell, however, immediately left the Khobar area and made their ways out of Saudi Arabia, traveling on a variety of false passports. Most of the perpetrators are believed to have traveled to Iran. Al-Qassab went to Syria. Al-Sayegh, however, took a circuitous route to Canada, traveling from Kuwait to Rome to Boston to Ottawa. The complicated itinerary may have reflected the operational security he and his co-conspirators were trained to employ to evade detection. Or it may simply have been, as al-Sayegh later claimed, that he found a cheap ticket on Alitalia Airlines that took this route.
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In the first days after the bombing, the US government had little hard information on the perpetrators. A July 1996 CIA analysis explained that “the Saudi investigation apparently is focusing on a group led by a Saudi Shia resident in Lebanon, but some reports point to Saudi Sunni militants or Iran as credible culprits.” Further hedging its bets, the CIA report included a text box noting that the Khobar attack occurred on the third anniversary of the US attack on the Iraqi Intelligence Service Headquarters and noted Iraq could not be ruled out as a suspect.
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