Hezbollah (47 page)

The Iraqi connection would quickly be dismissed, but the theory that the attack was carried out by radical Sunni “Afghan Arabs”—veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan inspired by bin Laden, like the accused and beheaded perpetrators of the OPM-SANG bombing—persisted for some time. In the weeks following the bombing, Saudi authorities arrested scores of suspects, Shi’a and Sunni alike. The Saudis claimed to have evidence linking some of the detained suspects to OPM-SANG suspects. “Our mistake,” one Saudi official quipped, “was to think that the first bombing
was an isolated case.”
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Early reports suggested six “former Afghan-trained fighters” confessed to the bombing, possibly after being tortured. This focus on radical Sunnis should not surprise, given the recentness of the OPM-SANG bombing and Osama bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa calling for war against the United States and its allies. According to Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper
al-Quds al-Arabi
who interviewed bin Laden, in the course of their discussions the al-Qaeda chief claimed responsibility for the Khobar bombing.
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Subsequent findings suggest this claim to have been bravado. But authorities have still not ruled out some kind of peripheral role by radical Sunni elements tied to al-Qaeda.

As a result of their meetings in the early 1990s, Iran and al-Qaeda reached an informal agreement to cooperate, with Iran providing critical explosives, intelligence, and security training to bin Laden’s organization. In addition to providing training, the 9/11 Commission report points to operational cooperation in planning and executing attacks. Referring, for example, to the Khobar Towers bombing, the 9/11 Commission report concludes, “The operation was carried out principally, perhaps exclusively, by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received support from the government of Iran. While evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.”
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As the investigation proceeded, Iran’s role in orchestrating the bombing would become crystal clear. Ultimately, FBI director Louis Freeh would testify that “the attack was planned, funded and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Republic of Iran; that the IRGC principally had the responsibility of putting that plan into operation; and it was [implemented] with the use of the Saudi Hezbollah organization and its members.”
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Within hours of the attack, FBI agents and forensic specialists were en route to Saudi Arabia to assist in the investigation. FBI agents conducted what FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson described as a soup-to-nuts crime scene investigation, measuring the crater and searching for bomb components and other physical evidence.
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The FBI then helped track the vehicle identification number found on a piece of the chassis of the truck bomb. Armed with this information, Saudi authorities quickly identified the company that sold the truck and the Saudi Hezbollah facilitator who purchased it. Analyzing the explosives used in the Khobar blast and comparing those with the explosives seized at the Jordanian border back in March, the FBI laboratory determined they were from similar batches of C4 military-grade plastic explosive. Saudi authorities then went back to the cell members detained at the border in the months before the bombing. These fresh interrogations yielded still more information about the plot.
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Meanwhile, six of the Saudi Hezbollah bombers were among the many people rounded up by Saudi authorities after the attack. Even as FBI investigators were sifting through the rubble at the bomb site, Saudi intelligence obtained the first confessions from the bombers. According to Louis Freeh, “the bombers admitted they had been trained by the Iranian external security service (IRGC) in the Bekka Valley, and received their passports at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, along with $250,000 cash for the operation from IRGC Gen. Ahmad Sharifi.”
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The FBI was keen to compile sufficient evidence to indict the bombers in US court for the deaths of nineteen US soldiers, but was frustrated in its early attempts to gain direct access to the suspects in Saudi custody. Then, in March 1997, the arrest of al-Sayegh in Canada provided the Bureau with its first big break. Canadian intelligence and law enforcement authorities had been watching al-Sayegh based on a tip from the Saudis. Although they preferred to keep him under surveillance to build a stronger case against him and learn more about the activities of Saudi Hezbollah and Iran, they received information indicating he was preparing to leave the country. On March 18, Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested him at the Queen Mary convenience store in Ottawa on joint orders of the minister of citizenship and immigration and the solicitor general, on the grounds that he posed “a security risk to Canada.”
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In May, al-Sayegh met with American officials and, after first claiming ignorance about the Khobar bombing, he soon confessed to having once belonged to the Saudi Hezbollah cell that carried out the bombing. Al-Sayegh informed officials that he was recruited by the IRGC and had participated not only in the Khobar bombing but also in another unspecified operation directed by Gen. Ahmad Sharifi.
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Al-Sayegh agreed to assist US officials investigating the bombing as part of a plea bargain. But once he arrived in the United States, he reneged on his agreement and sought political asylum in America. That effort failed, and in October 1999, al-Sayegh was deported to Saudi Arabia. Concerned that Hezbollah might retaliate against US interests for deporting al-Sayegh to Saudi Arabia, the State Department issued a worldwide warning advising US citizens “to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness to lessen their vulnerability.” The potential existed, US officials maintained, that “someone might try to take retaliatory action” for returning al-Sayegh to Saudi custody.
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In July, two months after al-Sayegh was arrested in Canada, the Syrian government turned Mustafa al-Qassab over to Saudi authorities.
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Referring to al-Qassab, Freeh would later note that a detained suspect—one “who had been returned to Saudi Arabia from another country”—provided “key information which would later implicate senior Iranian government officials as responsible for the planning, funding and execution of this attack.”
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Soon after Mohammed Khatami was elected president of Iran in May 1997, Saudi crown prince Abdullah raised the issue of the Khobar bombing with outgoing president Rafsanjani at a meeting in Pakistan. According to one account, Abdullah told Rafsanjani, “We know you did it.” Rafsanjani reportedly replied that he was not personally involved but that if any senior Iranian official was involved “it was he”—and he pointed upward in an understood reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
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Rafsanjani’s protestations of personal ignorance, however, contradict CIA reporting, which noted as early as 1990 that “the terrorist attacks carried out by Iran during the past year were probably approved in advance by President Rafsanjani and other senior leaders.”
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Ultimately, a deal was brokered that granted FBI agents indirect access to the suspects, but only in 1998. The agents could submit questions that Saudi officials would pose to the suspects while the agents observed the interview behind a one-way mirror. On November 9, 1998, FBI agents asked eight suspects a series of 212 questions posed
by Saudi agents at a Riyadh detention center. The Saudis also provided the transcripts of interviews with other detainees and other physical evidence they had collected. The net result, according to Freeh, amounted to “a devastating indictment.”
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Yet the information collected remained insufficient for senior US officials. With the statute of limitations nearing for any prospective indictment, the FBI pressed again for direct access to the suspects detained in Saudi Arabia. Finally, in 2000 the FBI got to talk directly with the detainees, including the eight suspects they had questioned indirectly through a one-way mirror two years earlier and others, among them al-Qassab. Each of their statements corroborated other evidence that had been collected, as well as one another’s statements. They provided detailed descriptions of the plot, including training, preparing the explosives, carrying money, hiding explosives, and the roles played by Iranian officials.
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For Freeh, the details al-Qassab provided about Iran’s role in the attack “tied the whole package together for good.”
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In June 2001, with the statute of limitations about to expire, the Department of Justice indicted thirteen members of the Saudi Hezbollah cell, including the unidentified Lebanese Hezbollah operative referred to as John Doe, in US federal court. To date, none of these fugitives have been captured, though several are believed to be living in Iran, including al-Nasser, al-Mughassil, and others. According to a 2009 Amnesty International report, Hani al-Sayegh and eight other accused co-conspirators were jailed in al-Dammam Prison, reportedly held without trial.
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In 2002, Saudi officials announced that some of the people involved in the Khobar Towers bombing had been tried and sentenced under Islamic law, but the officials would not specify who, or how many, or what the sentences were. The verdicts, a senior Saudi prince told the press, “must be announced at the right time.”
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That time has apparently yet to come.

Following the Khobar Towers attack, the Clinton administration sought additional intelligence about Iran’s role and warned Tehran against engaging in further attacks against US interests. According to former CIA and National Security Council official Bruce Riedel, “The administration also took targeted actions against the Revolutionary Guards and Iranian intelligence personnel around the world.” One of these, Operation Sapphire, was a CIA operation that identified Iranian intelligence officers operating abroad and disrupted their activities in early 1997.
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A January 1997 cable sent from the Office of the FBI Director to the CIA, the White House, and several FBI Legal Attaché offices abroad, among others, provided intelligence it described as “sensitive and singular in nature” warning that Hezbollah was funding “Saudi opposition elements in Kuwait for possible support of terrorist operations.” The warning was set against information that a Hezbollah spiritual leader had produced a videotape for distribution to opposition party members in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait that reportedly called for “Hezbollah supported suicide operations in defense of the [tenets] of Islam in the Gulf region.”
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Meanwhile, the activities of Iranian MOIS agents continued to worry US officials, prompting a disruption campaign targeting the MOIS in late 1999. Former CIA director George Tenet would later recount, “In one memorable example, John Brennan, our liaison to the Saudis, handled the local MOIS head himself. John walked up to
his car, knocked on the window, and said, “Hello, I’m from the U.S. embassy, and I’ve got something to tell you.”
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Such approaches spooked Iranian intelligence, Tenet notes. “Just being seen with some of our people might cause MOIS officers to fall under suspicion by their own agency.” Nor was Iran concerned only about its own operational security. Even as it continued to target US interests, Iran feared that after the Khobar attack, US or other intelligence services would accelerate their efforts to collect information about, and possibly target, Hezbollah. According to an American intelligence report, in November 1996 the director of the counterintelligence directorate within MOIS personally visited Mughniyeh in Beirut to assess Hezbollah’s security.
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Such activity continues. Testifying before Congress in 2008, Adm. William J. Fallon, then–commander of US Central Command, noted that Iran employs surrogate terrorist groups in the region and continues to engage in “confrontational activity in the Gulf.”
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Iran would increasingly use Hezbollah in the years to come as a strike force through which it could operate with probable deniability. In the 1990s, several such operations used Europe as a launching pad from which to deploy operatives into Israel to conduct attacks or collect operational intelligence. In fact, seven months before MOIS assessed Hezbollah’s security, the first of a string of Hezbollah operatives to infiltrate into Israel through Europe would be caught red-handed assembling a bomb in an East Jerusalem hotel room. Undeterred, more Hezbollah operatives would soon follow.

1.
US Department of Defense, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Downing Assessment Task Force, “Report of the Assessment of the Khobar Towers Bombing,” August 30, 1996 (hereafter cited as Downing Assessment); Rebecca Grant, “Khobar Towers,”
Air Force Magazine
81, no. 6 (June 1998), 41–47.

2.
United States of America v. Ahmed Mughassil et al
., Indictment, United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, No. 01-228-A, June 2001; Federal Court of Canada, In the Matter of Hani Abd Rahim al-Sayegh, and In the Matter of a Referral of the Immigration Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. I-2, Court File: DES-1-97; US Congress, 104th Cong., 2d sess., House, National Security Committee Staff Report, “The Khobar Towers Bombing Incident,” August 14, 1996; Grant, “Khobar Towers,” 41–47; US Department of Defense, “Report of Investigation Concerning the Khobar Towers Bombing, 25 June 1996,” Prepared by the Inspector General Lt. Gen. Richard T. Swope and the Judge Advocate General Byran G. Hawley, July 31, 1997.

3.
United States of America v. Ahmed Mughassil et al
., Indictment; Federal Court of Canada, In the Matter of Hani Abd Rahim al-Sayegh; House, National Security Committee Staff Report, “Khobar Towers Bombing Incident”; US Department of Defense, “Report of Investigation Concerning the Khobar Towers Bombing.”