Even before Khobar Towers, we were spilling out of the space. An eighty-one-day siege in Jordan, Montana, had ended less than two weeks earlier with the surrender of the sixteen remaining “Freemen” antigovernment extremists who had holed themselves up in a rural compound. The long memory of the fiery end of the fifty-one-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, three years earlier had kept us on high alert throughout the Montana ordeal. (The eleven-day siege ignited by the U.S. Marshals Service at Ruby Ridge in Idaho in 1992 was also much on our minds.) Khobar itself would soon seem a trigger to a summer of crises. Three weeks later, on July 17, TWA flight 800 exploded off Long Island minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 passengers aboard. No one knew what had brought it down: mechanical failure, a bomb, a ground-to-air missile all seemed possible in the early stages. Ten days after, a bomb exploded in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the height of the summer Olympic Games. With crisis piled on crisis, we had agents stashed in the hallway, working highly sensitive investigations on open phone lines. We had no choice. A new command center ten times larger (named by me after “Bush 41”) would finally be ready in 1999, but that was three years down the road. For now, we had to make do with what was, and that was cramped beyond belief.
My national security adviser, Robert “Bear” Bryant, was waiting for me. So were John O’Neill, Bryant’s section chief in charge of terrorism, and a few other agents of similar rank. (John would take over as chief of security for the World Trade Center in September 2001. He was killed September 11 of that year when the North Tower collapsed.) Bryant was in my view the best agent we ever had for counterintelligence and counterterrorism cases. Rock-solid, smart, and incredibly talented, he cared more about the people who worked for him than anyone else I know. As midnight came and went, we pored over intelligence reports, trying to work out theories of the attack.
Information was still scarce, which was telling in its own right. When something like Khobar Towers is the work of a loose confederation or of rank amateurs, listening posts at the CIA and NSA tend to light up with related chatter: participants phoning their wives and brothers to celebrate the great event or, better still, calling each other to plan a rendezvous or a next attack. The more disciplined the planners and bombers, the more silent the listening stations. For the moment, at least, the Khobar attackers and their masters were being quiet as a tomb, a strong hint that they were among the pros of global mayhem.
As for a working theory, the best we could do on short notice was to assume that this attack was a continuation of the earlier one on the Saudi National Guard headquarters. That one had been carried out, so we were told, by disaffected Sunnis, young men in their twenties and thirties who were resentful of the royal family and in league with Osama bin Laden, the black sheep of one of the kingdom’s richest families. We had, of course, no direct confirmation of that. The men in question had had their heads removed, with no consultation from us, but in the absence of other leads to pursue, we began to pull in intelligence from a variety of sources on Sunni radicals and the networks that supported them.
None of that, though, began to solve what for all of us in the room was the most pressing need: access. The Bureau had been true to Bill Clinton’s word: 150 FBI pros—including agents, lab analysts, and forensic experts—were headed for Riyadh. But we could fly another ten thousand agents there and it wouldn’t do a bit of good unless we could get them to the crime site and secure the cooperation of our hosts. That required the intervention of the royal family, and the only person I even faintly knew who fit that description was the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar. I picked up the phone and called him.
The prince took my call that night, and he couldn’t have been more gracious. We need to work together, I told him, and we want to cooperate with the Saudis on the ground in the kingdom. First, though, we need your help. His answer was what I’d hoped to hear: please come out to see me.
Prince Bandar lives at the crest of Washington diplomatic and political society. Other ambassadors wait in line to see the president; Bandar practically has his own key to the Oval Office. Thanks to the special relationship with the Saudis, and because of threats against him, he is the only ambassador to the United States assigned State Department protection. Bandar’s parties are legendary; the mansion in McLean, Virginia, where he lives and entertains, is epic. Passing between the enormous iron gates just off Virginia Route 123 that guard his driveway, I wondered who and how many people were waiting for me. I had come alone because I felt that the more the prince and I could put matters on a personal footing, the greater progress we would make, now and in the future. As it turned out, Bandar had only his highly competent principal deputy with him, Rihab Massoud, in effect the Saudi deputy chief of mission to the United States.
Over the course of perhaps two hours, including lunch, the three of us kicked around more working theories of the attack. The prince and Massoud, both excellent analysts, seemed to have no more idea than the Bureau did about who might be responsible, but Bandar did have new background information to offer. I learned for the first time that Hezbollah was active in the Sunni-dominated Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where the bombing had occurred. Although the Hezbollah is based in Lebanon, it takes its orders and draws financial and logistic support from Tehran, particularly Iran’s two security services, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Intelligence and Security Ministry (MOIS). That raised the specter that the Iranian government had known of and backed the bombing of Khobar Towers. Bandar agreed it was possible, but he doubted that was the case. For Iran to officially sanction an attack in the Saudi kingdom would be very serious, he said—a grave turn of events.
“I’ll work with you and the FBI to get what you need. President Clinton told me you are in charge,” the prince said near the end of our meeting. It turned out Prince Bandar was true to his word—the beginning of a friendship that grew stronger as I came to know and trust him.
“What we need first,” I said, “is access for the contingent we are sending over there. We also want to talk and work directly with your police.”
Bandar promised to call Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, to pave the way for the small army of agents we were flying into the kingdom.
“Do you know our police?” he asked.
“Well”—I laughed—“we have an agent in Rome … .”
Rome was, in fact, as close as we had been able to get to stationing one of our own in the kingdom. He dealt with Riyadh the way circuit preachers used to deal with tiny remote hamlets in the Old West: twice a year or so. With Bandar’s intervention, we would soon have an Arab-speaking agent living permanently in Riyadh, a huge leap forward.
As helpful as he was, Prince Bandar was not able to be completely forthright with me at that first meeting. He knew that two months earlier the Saudis had arrested a Qatif native named Fadel al-Alawe as he attempted to cross into the kingdom over the Jordanian border in a car loaded down with thirty-eight kilograms of plastic explosives. Under questioning, al-Alawe admitted to Saudi authorities that he had been involved in a series of surveillances at Khobar Towers. The car and its hidden explosives, he said, had been given to him in Beirut, and he had driven from Lebanon through Syria and Jordan to the border. By early April, three other plotters had been rounded up inside Saudi Arabia. As Bandar parceled the story out to me over the next several weeks, it became evident that the Saudis felt they had intercepted the plan and excised the terrorist cell that was to carry it out. In fact, the kingdom harbored numerous Hezbollah cells. With one rolled up, the plotters simply activated another.
Had we known about the earlier arrests, we certainly would have stepped up security at Dhahran. Quite possibly, we could have intercepted the tanker truck before it could be detonated. The nineteen dead might still be living. There’s a terrible potential price for holding that type of information so close to the vest. But secrecy is a way of life in that part of t
he world, and Bandar, I suppose, could argue that he had let out all he could by telling me at our first meeting about the Hezbollah presence in the Eastern Province. Besides, hindsight is always 20/20. We had to deal with what was, not what could have been.
When I got back to my office, I phoned Janet Reno and Sandy Berger and told them that I’d had a very productive discussion with Bandar. The table had been set for the team we were sending. Our lab analysts and forensic experts would have access to the crime site. I met that afternoon with John Deutsch, then head of the CIA, and told him the same thing. In both instances, I passed on Prince Bandar’s mention of the Hezbollah presence in eastern Saudi Arabia. That knowledge added to the stew, but in the absence of any stronger evidence, our working theory stayed as it was: Khobar was home grown, possibly connected to the earlier attack on the national guard building; for the Saudis, at least, an internal matter.
A little more than a day later, Bear Bryant, John O’Neill, a few others, and I boarded a plane at Andrews Air Force Base and followed our agents to the desert.
I would visit Saudi Arabia on multiple occasions over the next several years, but this was my first time. Until you’ve been there, I think, nothing can prepare you for the heat. After a seventeen-hour flight that took us through Frankfurt, Germany, in air-conditioned comfort—thanks to the Air Force’s elite 89th Squadron, the same people who fly the president—I walked off the plane wearing my standard blue suit into what felt like a wall of fire. Local time was about two in the afternoon. The thermometer stood at nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, just another day in Dhahran.
The ultimate goal of our visit was 225 miles west, in Riyadh. Prince Bandar had arranged for our small group to meet with the royal family, including King Fahd and Prince Nayef. Bandar had even arrived in advance of us to serve as translator. But that was for later in the evening—much later, I was to learn. For now, I wanted to visit what remained of Building 131.
The U.S. commander at the airbase, a one-star general, was on hand to greet us and escort us to Khobar Towers. He had been up, I would guess, for three straight days. Fatigue was written all over him, and a deep sense of personal responsibility that he had not done enough to protect the men and women under his charge. (And indeed he would later see his career derailed for allegedly failing to take adequate security measures at the base.)
At the crime site, the Saudis had laid down carpeting so people could watch the agents work—ours and theirs—without having to stand ankle-deep in the sand. The scene itself was staggering. The broad crater where the truck had exploded had a slick of mud-colored water across its bottom. Beyond, Building 131 looked as if some giant had ripped the front off.
The blast, clearly audible twenty miles away in Bahrain, had torn apart and scattered everything in its path. The human remains that had been discovered but not yet retrieved had been circled with red paint, a horrifying reminder of how fragile human life can be. The crime scene was littered with hairbrushes, photo frames, pieces of clothing—objects blown out of barracks rooms that no longer were surrounded by four walls.
As we approached the crime site from a distance, it seemed to be crawling with busy worker bees scurrying this way and that. Up close, the bees got a more human face. Most of them—our own agents, FBI personnel, and the Saudi police who were working alongside them—had been at it virtually nonstop for a day and a half: dealing with the body parts, using giant sifters to cull through the sand for any forensics that might be embedded there. The work is hard enough in normal conditions, physically and emotionally. Remember, people are looking for the smallest pieces of evidence; the strain on the eyes alone is monumental. Meanwhile, the temperature was slowly dropping from 120 to 110 as the afternoon wore on. I could see the exhaustion on all their faces. Some already had been treated for dehydration. Others would be. The unique smell of decaying human flesh was overwhelming, especially in the intense heat, but there was no way to hurry retrieval either. The evidentiary needs were too great.
I gathered our own people together to thank them for everything they were doing. I would be meeting with the king and his ministers later that evening, I told them, and I’d get the FBI all the help they needed and deserved. It seemed to be a boost they needed and appreciated.
An emergency hospital had been set up nearby, no more than a few hundred yards from the crater, and I went there next. The place was filled with the walking wounded—splints and bandages, facial wounds from the flying glass—and those still being examined and treated. I talked to as many of them as I could muster, mostly in smaller groups. I wanted them to know that their government was on the case, that we weren’t going to rest until we found out who had done this and had brought them to justice. I was still in my mid-forties then, but as always when I’m around soldiers and sailors and airmen in situations like that, I was struck by how young so many of them seemed.
The images of those wounded servicemen and -women were still with me at two the next morning when our small party was finally received by King Fahd at his palace in Riyadh.
We had been flown by helicopter to Riyadh from Dhahran late that afternoon. Prince Bandar, who all of a sudden seemed to be everywhere, greeted us at the airport and led us to a “waiting palace”—in effect, a large, very modern hotel where we were to cool our heels until King Fahd sent for us. (Specific appointments are out of the question: no one is the king’s equal, and thus no one can command his time. He commands yours.) For our side, at least, the break was welcomed. We had been gone for twenty-four hours by then. Most of us hadn’t had a chance to shower or shave, much less change clothes or get any meaningful sleep.
I used part of the time to get an intelligence briefing from John Brennan, the CIA’s chief of station in Saudi Arabia. Amazingly, John had also grown up in North Bergen, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. Now here we were, halfway around the world, swapping leads about a bombing at the eastern edge of the Arabian desert. Meanwhile, a squadron of limousines and their drivers sat in front of our holding palace, waiting to whisk us into King Fahd’s presence whenever the summons came.
When the call finally did arrive, about ninety minutes after midnight, we piled into the limos only to be delayed further by what seemed like innumerable checkpoints along our route. Better than anyone else, the Saudi royals understand the perilous world they live and rule in. The king’s palace, or more accurately, the palace complex, was out of a storybook: a grand and ornate confection of marble, glass, and towering minarets, all centrally air-conditioned and so secure that a mouse would have trouble sneaking in. One of the members of the royal family met us and showed us eventually to the throne room, where King Fahd was waiting.
The U.S. contingent sat to one side of the king. John Brennan hadn’t come along for obvious reasons, but the acting ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Ted Kattouf, joined us. On the king’s other side were Crown Prince Abdullah and most of the senior princes. Although King Fahd held the place of honor among us all, he said little other than to welcome us and express condolences for the American losses. Fahd had suffered a debilitating stroke the previous November. Succession battles within the family had been anything but easy, but the crown prince appeared to be speaking for the king.
On behalf of our side, I thanked the king and his family for receiving us, assured them all that we were here to work in cooperation with but under the aegis of the Mubahith, the Saudi equivalent of a combined FBI and CIA, and expressed our condolences for the Saudi losses at Khobar Towers. As so often is the case in terrorist attacks, these dead had been minding their own business in a park across the street from the compound when the truck bomb went off.
As I had a few days earlier with Prince Bandar, we talked about who might be responsible for the bombing and why. No one on the Saudi side even hinted that members of a Hezbollah terrorist cell were then being held on suspicion of planning a similar attack, although, like Bandar, they all must have known about the arrest on the Jordanian border. For my part, I stated t
he U.S. position very carefully: we didn’t know who was responsible, and we didn’t want to make rash assumptions. That’s why we needed to conduct an investigation on Saudi soil and why we needed the maximum cooperation from the Mubahith and other agencies under the royal family’s control. At a minimum, I said, we would need to have our own agents in place in Saudi Arabia for months. By now, my American colleagues had heard me make the point so often—and the hour was so late and our small party so sleep-starved—that several of them seemed on the verge of falling over where they sat. Not so on the Saudi side. They’ve learned to adjust to life in an arid land under a broiling sun by being nocturnal. The night was still young. As if to prove it, the king, through the crown prince, assured me that leaving FBI agents on Saudi soil would be no problem. Then he suggested that Prince Nayef and I adjourn to the Interior Ministry to discuss details.
The sort of parity of office that diplomats fret over is nearly impossible to achieve with the Saudis. As interior minister, Nayef and I shared many similar duties and responsibilities, but I was almost halfway through a ten-year appointment. His position was held by blood, for life, so long as he didn’t end up on the wrong side of whoever was occupying the throne. Still, unequals that we were, we did manage to hammer out some working arrangements along with several senior Mubahith officers who had accompanied us. And then, around four o’clock in the morning, we finally sat down to dinner, a seven-or eight-course affair with blessedly few culinary surprises. I was well past hunger.
The arrangement wasn’t perfect. So long as we were unable to directly question suspects—or even sit in while Saudi authorities did the questioning—we would always be investigating a vicious multiple murder with one hand tied behind our back. What’s more, indictments would be hard to come by and convictions even harder to win without being able to offer such critical testimony. That, after all, is what the United States of America had promised its citizens and the world, as well as the families and loved ones of those who had been killed and grievously injured: that justice would be done. Seeing justice done was always the carrot dangling in front of our eyes.
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