But within the confines of a secretive and deeply conflicted culture, the Saudis, I thought, had probably gone as far as they could toward accommodating us. Pushing them further into our camp, getting them to see the investigation more through our eyes, would take pressure from the very top of our own government. And that, as the investigation wore on and more and more new information bubbled to the surface, was precisely where I found myself most stymied: not halfway around the world on the Arabian Peninsula but at home, a half dozen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Let me try to explain.
I was probably still suffering from jet lag from that initial trip to Saudi Arabia when I had my first serious conversations with Sandy Berger on how to handle the bombing. All things being equal, I told the then-deputy national security adviser, we would expect to undertake the criminal investigation. That was our statutory duty. We had the resources and talent to undertake the job, and the will to see it through. Just as important, we had the Saudis about as lined up as we were likely to get them on the front end. But all things weren’t equal. That was obvious. Even though the attack had occurred on foreign soil, this had been an act of war against the United States of America. Saudis were killed, to be sure, but American military personnel had been targeted. If the president decided to take military or other action against the perpetrators, I didn’t want the criminal investigation to get in the way, and I certainly didn’t want the president deferring to the Department of Justice or the FBI just because he would be preempting our investigation.
In retrospect, the point I was trying to make sounds almost petty. An American military barracks was in ruins; people had been left blown apart in the blistering Saudi sun. I’d seen them there, and I would never forget the sight. To me, though, the matter I was raising was crucial, and in the months that followed, I repeated it constantly. The FBI was going after the killers with everything at our disposal. I couldn’t guarantee we would ever bring them to trial, but we would continue to pursue them until we had run every last one of them to ground. But we understood that in the hierarchy of possible responses, ours was second tier. Bill Clinton was commander in chief. If he decided that we were getting in the way of more appropriate action, we would step aside.
Bill Clinton had courted me to become FBI director three years earlier, but by the early summer of 1996, fault lines were showing in our relationship. Maybe I was, in Clinton’s eyes, too much the altar boy I once had been, or too insensitive to the nuances of politics. Whatever had driven a wedge between us, the strain was an open secret within the inner circle of the administration. That, too, was on my mind as I sought to clarify the Bureau’s position relative to the Khobar Towers investigation: I’d fallen off the A-list at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But Sandy Berger knew all that, and he was very definitive in his response every time I raised the matter: The president is clear on this, he would tell me. He wants you to conduct the investigation, and he has told the Saudis that. The FBI is in charge; Louis Freeh is the point man. The Bureau, I was assured, had the president’s complete cooperation and authority on this. I remember the phrase exactly because the administration was still repeating it three years later: we were to leave “no stone unturned” in finding the killers and bringing them to justice. Trouble was, the administration’s actions didn’t come close to matching its rhetoric.
I traveled twice again to Saudi Arabia during the months just after that first visit. On one of those trips, Prince Bandar took me aside and told me, “Listen, we have the goods,” and slowly, very slowly, with many fits and starts, the “goods” did begin to come together. As they did, they pointed ineluctably toward Iran.
(On that same trip, during a dinner at Bandar’s Riyadh palace, the elegant Saudi ambassador to the U.S. reached his well-manicured hand into a roast baby camel’s hump, drew out a fistful of meat, and deposited it on my plate—a great honor, he assured me. It was my one and only experience with baby camel’s hump, but it was good: closer to tenderloin than chicken in flavor.)
In March 1997, in the first truly big break in the case, Canadian authorities acting on a tip from the Saudis arrested the driver of the Datsun used in the Khobar Towers bombing, Hani al-Sayegh. Al-Sayegh, who had been living in Canada since August 1996 under a false passport, denied any part in the attack, but that May, under questioning in an Ottawa detention center by an assistant U.S. attorney and several FBI agents, he did admit to having once been a member of the Hezbollah cell that carried it out. He had been recruited for the cell, he said, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and had taken part in two operations directed by one of the Guard’s brigadier generals, Ahmad Sherifi.
Two months later, in mid-July, the Syrian government turned over to the Saudis Mustafa al-Qassab, another member of the Hezbollah cell responsible for the Khobar attack and like many of them a Qatif native. Not long after that, at a meeting in Pakistan, outgoing Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani essentially admitted to Saudi crown prince Abdullah that the Khobar attack had been planned and carried out with the knowledge of the Iranian supreme ruler, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Simultaneously, the Saudis were sending the same signals to the administration. Within the first months after the attack, Prince Bandar and Rihab Massoud had met with Tony Lake, still then the national security adviser, and Sandy Berger to prepare them for the likelihood of an Iranian connection to the Khobar Towers attack and to hash over the implications. This was four years before 9/11, remember. The bombing appeared to be the work of Hezbollah, Iran’s exclusive terrorist agent, and at that point, Hezbollah, not al Qaeda, held the grim distinction of having slaughtered more Americans than any other terrorist organization.
A blind pig couldn’t have missed the outlines, but to flesh out the connections and put the dots together, we needed permission for FBI agents to sit in on and help conduct the questioning of suspects held in Saudi custody. That, we were told time and again—by Bandar and others—could happen only if the president and his top people exerted pressure on Crown Prince Abdullah and King Fahd to make it happen.
In the White House, though, and at the State Department in Foggy Bottom, interest was headed in another direction. In May 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected to succeed Rafsanjani as president of Iran. “Moderate” is a relative term in a country as radicalized at the top as Iran, but to the Clinton foreign-policy team, Khatami seemed the best hope for moving toward a normalization of relations between the two countries, and it soon became apparent that the Khobar Towers investigation was not going to get in the way of that.
The FBI didn’t report to the State Department, but we needed its authorization to send our agents there. Suddenly, authorizations became far harder to secure. State was after us on another front as well. We had begun fingerprinting and making photos of all the athletes that Iran sent to the U.S. Our reasoning was simple: intelligence officers were almost always embedded in the teams. They would come here, make contacts, run a few sources, and head back home to Tehran with some friendly State Department liaison waving good-bye at the airport. We thought the fingerprints and photos would discourage the practice, and indeed it did, but it also raised the Iranians’ ire, and finally that ire bubbled all the way up to the White House, which ordered us to stop the practice.
Not a good idea, I told Madeleine Albright, who had succeeded Warren Christopher as secretary of state.
“The Iranians are complaining,” she responded.
“Of course, they are,” I told her. “That’s the point.” But to no avail. Later, her assistant secretary for the Middle East, Martin Indyk, would tell us that the president was, in fact, furious. By then, I was used to it.
This is not to say that many great and dedicated people in Washington did not offer their much-needed support on Khobar. Porter Goss and Arlen Specter, most notably, never wavered in their help and encouraged me to follow through with our investigation at whatever political cost. But that was coming from Capitol Hill. We needed the Executive Branch on our side, too.
“Didn’t the matter come up?” I would ask Sandy.
“Oh, it came up,” he would assure me, “but in another context.” Whatever that meant. Meanwhile, Prince Bandar, whom I had begun to alert about these talking-point opportunities, would shake his head the next time I saw him and wonder why Clinton or Gore had failed to raise the matter in anything like an urgent way.
Then, in September 1997, the Justice Department, my employer, moved to dismiss the indictment we had obtained against Hani al-Sayegh, who had been nabbed in Canada. The reasons are complicated. Al-Sayegh was a pain in the neck. He suffered frequent changes of heart. Because we were being frustrated in our attempts to interview the cell members being held in Saudi Arabia, we had no corroborating witnesses for al-Sayegh even if we could have gotten him to talk. As a lawyer, I understood all that. But al-Sayegh had been our foot in the door, and what I saw as the almost celebratory attitude at the White House in getting rid of him sat poorly with me. Three months later almost to the day, on December 11, 1997, I met at the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, with the families of those who had been killed at Khobar Towers.
The impetus behind the Quantico assembly was simple. Nearly a year and a half had passed since the attack at Dhahran, and neither the State Department nor the Department of Defense had spent any real time briefing the families of the Khobar victims. Understandably, the families were very upset. We couldn’t bring back their loved ones, but we could let the mothers and fathers, the wives and husbands and brothers and sisters, the fiancées and the children know that their dead hadn’t been forgotten. I invited Sandy Berger to join us and add his perspective from the National Security Council. He declined. So did all the major White House figures. Janet Reno was there from Justice. Bill Cohen, the former Republican senator from Maine who had replaced Les Aspin as secretary of defense, showed up too. I’m still grateful to both of them. They were supportive and honest, and their presence was greatly appreciated.
The meetings lasted three days, and I was there for every moment of them and every meal: morning, noon, and night. We had a scale model of Building 131 and its crater to explain the explosion, and a slide show of the suspects we had so far identified. I didn’t have to tell these people that the Saudis had been slow to provide information or that the Clinton administration had been reluctant to press the Saudis harder. They already knew.
When the families asked me to promise that the FBI would continue its investigation and do everything we could to see justice done, I vowed that we would do that. As I wrote earlier, that was always the prize in front of us. When one woman, the mother of a thirty-five-year-old master sergeant who had died in the attack, asked why we let the Saudis get away with withholding information and access, I told her that I was a policeman, not a politician. I meant both things, but I empathized deeply with her sense of being let down by her own country after her son had given his life for America.
The White House had never pulled us off the case, never told us that the administration was pursuing other avenues or policies that served other ends, never said stop. Until they did, we would not rest or turn away. I had cut my teeth as an FBI agent working to bring down some of the biggest organized crime families in America. Later, as an assistant and deputy U.S. attorney, I had prosecuted mafiosi who killed people almost casually. As a federal judge, I’d seen what happens when the government fails to be honest with the people it governs. We might bargain away a sentence for testimony to land a bigger fish, but we didn’t walk away from murder. And we didn’t close the books on nineteen dead just because it suddenly became inconvenient to pursue the matter. Yet all the evidence I could see suggested that’s exactly what we were doing.
As 1998 wore on, Bill Clinton was pursuing rapprochement with the Iranians and finding himself in increasingly hot water domestically. Ken Starr was dogging the president; Monica Lewinsky had become maybe the best-known White House intern in history. Meanwhile, Khobar Towers was sliding further and further toward the back burner. By summer, the number of our agents stationed in Saudi Arabia had sunk from several dozen to a lone legal attaché. At one meeting, I can’t remember exactly when, Sandy Berger made mention of the seventeen people who had been killed in the attack.
“Look,” I said, “there were nineteen killed, not seventeen.” I tried to say it as an aside, without putting the full weight behind it of the incredible frustration I was feeling, and I must have succeeded because my little correction slid right by everyone present. It was just Louie being a pain in the ass again about Khobar as far as they were concerned.
I should say here, since Sandy Berger has been fairly prominent in this story so far, that I had absolutely nothing against him personally. He was always a gentleman, always respectful of the Bureau and of me. Unlike a lot of people in the White House, he was punctual, too: If Sandy called a meeting for 10 A.M., you could pretty much count on it starting at 10 A.M. That’s worth gold in Washington as far as I’m concerned.
But Sandy had come out of the political side of the Clinton machine. He’d been part of the campaign. Even when he was deputy national security adviser, he sat in on the once-a-week political meetings at the White House, and they weren’t discussing foreign policy. Unlike his predecessor, Tony Lake, who had a long academic and professional background in foreign affairs, Sandy had been a trade lawyer with the Washington mega-firm of Hogan and Hartson.
Don’t get me wrong: Sandy did have a very sincere interest in foreign policy—of that I’m certain—but the lens through which he seemed to view everything was the politics of getting Bill Clinton reelected and, later, of preserving Clinton’s legacy and the Democratic party’s hold on the presidency. Among other things, that meant shortchanging the needs of the Khobar Tower families. Or so I read the situation. But I wasn’t out of resources.
That September, Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage took over the entire 143-room Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Park from the White House, for six days. The visit, I figured, was pretty much our last chance.
Again, we prepared talking points for the president. Again, I contacted Prince Bandar and asked him to soften up the crown prince for the moment when Clinton—or Al Gore, I didn’t care who—would raise the matter and start to exert the necessary pressure. And again, nothing happened. Sandy Berger would later insist that Clinton had leaned hard on Abdullah for cooperation, but that’s not the way I heard it. The story that came back to me, from “usually reliable sources,” as they say in Washington, was that Bill Clinton briefly raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he certainly understood the Saudis’ reluctance to cooperate. Then, according to my sources, he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the still-to-be-built Clinton presidential library. Gore, who was supposed to press hardest of all in his meeting with the crown prince, barely mentioned the matter, I was told.
In testimony before the Joint Intelligence Committees on October 8, 2002, I described for members of Congress the many difficult matters that had to be overcome in order that the Bureau might gain access to the Saudi nationals who were being held in the kingdom and who had already admitted to taking part in the Khobar bombing. We didn’t want to taint the suspects’ prosecution under Islamic law. We understood, too, what an
ugly can of worms we would be opening, in Washington and Riyadh, if we could show that senior Iranian officials had been behind the Khobar attack. History was against us also: No FBI agent there had ever been given direct access to a detained Saudi national.
“Despite these extremely sensitive and complex issues,” I told the committees, “the Saudis put their own interests aside to aid the FBI and the United States. Supported by Prince Bandar, Prince Nayef, and the Saudi Mubahith, Crown Prince Abdullah decided to grant the FBI’s request to interview the detainees.”
That’s part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. I was guilty of a sin of omission before the committee members. A president was instrumental in our gaining access to the Saudi detainees, but it wasn’t President Bill Clinton.
The debacle of the meetings during the Hay-Adams Hotel stay had convinced me that we were never going to be able to achieve justice for the Khobar victims, or closure for their families and loved ones, by sticking with the status quo. The job wasn’t getting done. From the administration’s point of view, the case was a diminishing asset. Nor could I appeal directly to the Oval Office for a change of heart. By the fall of 1998 I had been Bill Clinton’s top cop for half a decade, but he hadn’t spoken to me in two years.
I did, however, know another president. George H. W. Bush and I had had a casual and friendly relationship ever since he had made me a federal district judge during the third year of his administration. Sometimes I would call the first President Bush for advice; other times he would simply phone to chat. It was during one of those conversations, in late September 1998, that the former president happened to mention that he was going to see Crown Prince Abdullah that Saturday.
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