129. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud and Chawki Youssef Hammoud, May 23, 2002, p. 90.
130. Burger and Shannon, “Hezbollah Is Moving Up the Threat Chart.”
131. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., Letter from Andy Walcott addressed to “Ken” at the FBI Charlotte office, received February 14, 2001, file no. 265-CE-82188-T.
132. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “United States’ Response to Motion to Suppress/Motion for Sanctions/Motion for Immediate Sealed Hearing,” filed March 21, 2001, unsealed November 11, 2002, p. 4.
133. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “Defendant’s Sealed Reply to Government’s Sealed Response to Defendant’s Sealed Motion in Limine,” Docket No. 3:00 CR 147-1-MU, filed December 28, 2001, unsealed November 6, 2002.
134. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “Defendant Mohamad Hammoud’s Supplement to Sealed Motion in Limine,” Docket No. 3:00 CR 147-1-MU, filed August 8, 2001, unsealed November 6, 2002.
135. Transcript of conversation between Andy Walcott and Mohamad Hammoud, FBI, recorded February 20, 2001, transcribed March 36, 2001, File No. 265-CE-82188-T.
136. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “United States’ Response to Motion to Suppress/Motion for Sanctions/Motion for Immediate Sealed Hearing,” Docket No. 3:00 CR 147-1-MU, Filed March 21, 2001, Unsealed November 6, 2002.
137. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., Federal Bureau of Investigation FD-302 (Rev.10-6-95), Verbatim transcript of two separate consensually recorded conversations between a cooperating witness (CM) and Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, recorded February 8, 2001, transcribed February 14, 2001, File Number 265B-CE-82188, Docket No. 3:00 CR 147-1-MU, Exhibit Q.
138. Universal Strategy Group, Directed Study of Lebanese Hezbollah, produced for the United States Special Operations Command, Research and Analysis Division, October 2010, 85, 89.
139. United States of America v. Fawzi Mustapha Assi, Government’s Sentencing Memorandum, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, Criminal No. 98-80695, June 9, 2008.
140. Ibid.
141. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., FBI 302 interview of Said Mohamad Harb, August 18, 2000, Case No. 265B-CE-82188, p. 9.
142. United States of America v. Ali Boumelhem, Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit, No. 00-81013, decided and filed August 12, 2003; Ronald J. Hansen, “Lebanese in Metro Detroit on Edge,” Detroit News, January 2, 2002.
143. 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; “Annex ‘E’ – Interview with Mohamad Hussein Al Husseini,” September 23, 1993.
144. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth District; Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Hezbollah Sets Up Operations in South America and the United States,” The New Yorker, October 28, 2002.
145. Bell, “Hizballah Fundraising in the American Heartland.”
146. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud and Chawki Youssef Hammoud, June 10, 2002, pp. 1487–88.
147. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud and Chawki Youssef Hammoud, June 12, 2002, pp. 1590–1600.
148. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud and Chawki Youssef Hammoud, June 10, 2002, pp. 1486–87.
149. Ibid., 1477.
150. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “CSIS Summaries, Redacted Copy, Trial Testimony,” Docket No. 3:00-cr-147, Trial Exhibit 304, p. 58.
151. Ibid., 35.
152. “Top Hizbullah Official in South Lebanon Nabil Qaouq: The Resistance Is Using This Period to Train and Strengthen Its Capabilities and Is Preparing for the Great Confrontation,” Al-Alam TV (Iran) and Future TV (Lebanon), July 26, 2010.
153. Nada Bakri, “Hezbollah Leader Backs Syrian President in Public,” New York Times, December 6, 2011.
154. Fromme and Schwein, “Operation Smokescreen.”
155. Diaz and Newman, Lightning Out of Lebanon, 165.
156. Fromme and Schwein, “Operation Smokescreen.”
157. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “CSIS Summaries, Redacted Copy, Trial Testimony,” p. 58.
158. Fromme and Schwein, “Operation Smokescreen.”
159. Statement of Robert J. Conrad Jr., Assessment of the Tools Needed to Fight the Financing of Terrorism.
160. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “CSIS Summaries, Redacted Copy, Trial Testimony,” p. 11.
161. Ibid., 23.
162. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., FBI 302 interview of Said Mohamad Harb, July 21, 2000, Case No. 265B-CE-82188, p. 11.
163. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “CSIS Summaries, Redacted Copy, Trial Testimony,” p. 103.
164. Ibid., 5
165. Ibid., 22.
166. Statement of Robert J. Conrad Jr., Assessment of the Tools Needed to Fight the Financing of Terrorism.
167. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., “CSIS Summaries, Redacted Copy, Trial Testimony,” pp. 42–43.
168. United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., FBI 302 interview of Said Mohamad Harb, August 18, 2000, p. 9.
169. Mark Dubowitz, “Wanted: A War on Terrorist Media,” Journal of International Security Affairs 17, Fall 2009.
170. US Department of the Treasury, “U.S. Designates Al-Manar as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity; Television Station Is Arm of Hezbollah Terrorist Network,” press release, March 23, 2006.
171. United States of America vs. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud et al., Opening statement of Assistant US Attorney Kenneth Bell, May 23, 2002, p. 33.
172. Stewart Bell, “Canada May Be Terror Target,” National Post (Canada), July 23, 2009.
173. Rudner, “Hizbullah: An Organizational and Operational Profile,” 239.
174. “Canada Expels 4th Iraqi Diplomat,” Vancouver Sun, January 23, 1991.
175. Bill Gladstone, “Ex-official: Hezbollah Network of Operatives Active in Canada,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 9, 1997.
176. Canada, Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), “Hizballah: Capability to Conduct Terrorist Attacks, But No Intent,” ITAC Intelligence Assessment, July 19, 2006.
177. Canada, Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), “Evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon,” ITAC Intelligence Assessment, July 21, 2006.
178. Author interview, Canadian intelligence, law enforcement, and policy officials, Ottawa, Canada, January 12, 2010.
179. Author interview, Canadian intelligence officials, Ottawa, Canada, January 12, 2010.
180. Author interview, Canadian analyst and community activist, Montreal, Canada, March 16, 2010.
181. Canada, Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), “Hizballah Leader Threatens Israeli Interests Abroad,” ITAC Threat Assessment, February 15, 2008.
182. Canada, Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), “Hizballah’s ‘Open War’: Implications for Canada,” ITAC Intelligence Assessment, March 6, 2008.
183. Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, “Hezbollah Poised to Strike,” ABC News, June 19, 2008.
184. Author interview, Canadian intelligence officials, Ottawa, Canada, January 12, 2010.
185. Author interview, Washington, DC, February 26, 2010.
186. Stewart Bell, “Hezbollah Cell Smashed as FBI Hits Arms Trade,” National Post (Canada), November 25, 2009.
187. “Canadian Jewish Congress Exposes Incitement to Hatred and Violence at Pro-Hamas Rallies,” Canadian Jewish Congress, accessed on YouTube June 30, 2010.
188. Author interview, Canadian intelligence officials, Ottawa, Canada, January 12, 2010.
&n
bsp; 189. Stewart Bell, “Bulgaria Bus Bombing Suspect had Real Canadian Passport, Lived in B.C. before Return to Lebanon at Age 12,” National Post (Canada), February 6, 2013.
190. Author interview, Canadian intelligence officials, Ottawa, Canada, March 15, 2010; US Department of Justice, FBI, “International Radical Fundamentalism.”
7
Bombing Khobar Towers
IT WAS JUNE 25, 1996, Brig. Gen. Terryl J. Schwalier’s last day commanding US troops stationed in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The 4404th Wing of the US Air Force was a critical component of the coalition’s enforcement of the no-fly and no-drive zones south of the 32nd parallel in southern Iraq under Operation Southern Watch following the 1991 Gulf War. General Schwalier had already packed his bags before venturing into Dhahran that evening for a dinner of Saudi-style Mexican food with Maj. Gen. Kurt B. Anderson, commander of Joint Task Force–Southwest Asia. General Anderson was visiting the Khobar Towers military housing complex to attend the change-of-command ceremony scheduled for the following day. Built by the Saudis in 1979, the Khobar complex was barely used until coalition forces operating in the Dhahran area first took up residence there during the Gulf War in 1990. By 9 PM, as the muezzin called the faithful to prayer just outside the compound, Gen. Schwalier was back at his desk writing a note for the man who would replace him.1
Elsewhere on the compound, Staff Sgt. Alfredo R. Guerrero, a security policeman and shift supervisor, was checking in on sentries posted throughout the compound. Khobar Towers was located in the middle of a residential area. To the east was a set of high-rise buildings and to the north were a parking lot, a city park, and a mosque under construction. Security was a full-time job at Khobar Towers, especially after a terrorist bombing in Riyadh the previous November and successive bombings in Bahrain—just a forty-minute drive across a causeway—in December, January, February, and March.
A few minutes before 10 PM, Staff Sergeant Guerrero made his way to the eight-story Building 131, located at the northern edge of the Khobar Towers compound. As Guerrero neared the northeast corner of the roof, where two other sentries were keeping watch, a 5,000-gallon tanker truck and a white Chevrolet Caprice sedan approached the compound, turning toward the parking lot opposite Building 131. Heading toward the lot, the white sedan flashed its headlights and a second car, which had parked in the lot just a few minutes earlier, flashed its lights in return. Seeing the “all clear” signal, the white sedan and tanker pulled into the lot.2
From the roof, Staff Sergeant Guerrero and the other police officers noticed the two vehicles enter the lot. They watched as the truck drove to the second-to-last row of parking spaces, turned left as if about to exit the lot, and then backed up into the hedges at the perimeter fence directly in front of Building 131. Two men jumped out of the truck and into the waiting sedan, which then sped away followed by the prepositioned signal car.3
One of the police officers alerted the security desk by radio, and all three began to evacuate the building in a top-to-bottom “waterfall” fashion. They knocked loudly on each door, yelling that everyone should evacuate immediately and pass along the message to residents on lower floors as they ran downstairs. It was 9:49 PM. Within minutes the top three floors were evacuated, but that was as far as they got. Even the loudspeaker warning system could not be activated in the six minutes between the terrorists’ abandoning the tanker truck at the perimeter fence and the massive explosion that tore the entire north face off Building 131 at 9:55 PM.4
Carrying at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives, the tanker truck detonated with the power of about 20,000 pounds of TNT.5 More than twice as powerful as the 1983 bomb Hezbollah used to destroy the US Marine barracks in Beirut, the blast was later determined to have been the largest nonnuclear explosion then on record.6 The bomb left a crater eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, damaged buildings across the Khobar Towers compound, and was felt twenty miles away in Bahrain.7
Nineteen US Air Force personnel were killed in the attack, and another 372 Americans were wounded.8 A number of Saudi citizens unfortunate enough to be in the nearby park at the time of the bombing were also killed.9 The wounded included Saudi, Bangladeshi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Indonesian, and Filipino citizens as well.10
Over the next five years the FBI would lead a massive, politically sensitive investigation that would ultimately prompt the indictment in US federal court of thirteen members of the Iranian-sponsored Saudi Hezbollah—and an unidentified Lebanese Hezbollah operative referred to in the indictment as John Doe.
In time, authorities would trace the meticulously organized plot to bomb Khobar Towers to 1993, when Ahmed al-Mughassil, who then headed the military wing of Saudi Hezbollah, instructed members of a Saudi Hezbollah terrorist cell to begin carrying out surveillance of Americans in Saudi Arabia.11 The larger conspiracy, however, dates even further back and involves long-running tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the condition of the Shi’a minority in Saudi Arabia, the radicalization of a segment of the Saudi Shi’a community, and its ties to Iran.
The Birth of Saudi Hezbollah
Representing roughly 10 to 15 percent of all Saudis, the kingdom’s Shi’a population—along with its largest oil fields—is located primarily in the Eastern Province. While Saudi Shi’a from the region are employed in the oil industry, the wealth that results is primarily invested elsewhere in the kingdom. The inequality in the distribution of wealth follows decades of religious intolerance for the Shi’a—seen as heretics by many in Saudi Arabia’s conservative Sunni society—that has translated into discrimination in education, employment, administration of justice, and more.12
Encouraged by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the Shi’a community in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province was inspired to confront the Saudi government—sometimes peaceably, sometimes not. In 1979, riots and mass protests broke out after police responded to several thousand Shi’a who defied a government ban on commemorating the Shi’a holy day of Ashura. Already on edge over the occupation of the Grand Mosque of Mecca just days earlier by Sunni extremists, the Saudi National Guard responded to the Shi’a protests using lethal force, reportedly targeting demonstrators with helicopter gunships. About twenty people were killed in the initial clashes, and the Saudi government crackdown lasted well into early 1980. Many more Shi’a were arrested and several hundred fled into exile, primarily in Iran and Syria. Among those who fled, a Canadian report notes, “it is believed that some of these persons may have been trained by the Hizballah. Those individuals who received this training became the Saudi Hizballah.”13 The events of 1979–80, collectively known as the “intifada of the Eastern Province,” would loom large in the collective memory of Saudi Shi’a. The crackdown convinced most radical Saudi Shi’a that a violent confrontation with the Saudi regime was not realistic, leading some to fight for other radical Shi’a groups in Bahrain and Iraq, or on Iran’s side in the Iran-Iraq War. Already in the early 1980s, such groups enjoyed the support of the government of Iran through its Office of the Liberation Movements and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).14
July 31, 1987, marked a tragic watershed for Saudi Shi’a. During the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the Grand Mosque in Mecca, more than 400 people, including many Iranian pilgrims, were trampled in a human stampede. Among the dead were Saudi policemen, and rumors spread that some of the Shi’a killed were tied to Saudi Shi’a organizations, leading Saudi and Iranian officials to engage in a cycle of recrimination over the clashes that led to the stampede.15 As a result, Iran courted radical Shi’a in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province to carry out attacks against Saudi targets. By one account, “Iran wanted to have small, controllable organizations that could be used as pressure tools on the Al Saud [ruling family] but would not endanger Iran’s foreign policy objectives.”16 Just two months earlier, in May 1987, Saudi Hezbollah had been officially founded primarily in response to the quietist stance taken by other Saudi Shi’a groups and their less intimate ties to
Iran. Some of the new group’s members came from Tajamu Ulama al-Hijaz, a group that had been more focused on religious and political than violent activities. Others, including Ahmed al-Mughassil, who later headed Saudi Hezbollah’s military wing and masterminded the Khobar Towers attack, as well as several US-educated Saudi Shi’a, were former members of other groups, like the Movement for the Vanguards Missionaries.17
Following the tragedy at the Hajj, Iran found a pool of radicalized Saudi Shi’a willing to carry out attacks against the Saudi regime in support of Iran—and they wasted no time in retaliating.18 A week after the tragedy, Saudi Hezbollah issued its first official statement vowing to challenge the ruling Saudi family. The next month, in August 1987, Saudi Hezbollah carried out a bombing attack against a petroleum facility in Ras al-Juayma. Saudi Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack and, in communiqués issued in Beirut and Tehran, threatened further revenge attacks targeting Saudi officials.19 The following month Saudi Hezbollah announced plans to attack US and Saudi interests worldwide.20
According to CIA reporting at the time, Iran had already “smuggled explosives into Saudi Arabia and conducted terrorist operations against Kuwait targets.” Iran, the CIA concluded, would “keep the United States as a primary terrorist target” for itself and its surrogates for a variety of reasons, including the US military presence in the Gulf, the recent reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers, the seizure of an Iranian ship laying mines in the Gulf, and an attack on an Iranian oil platform used to support Iranian military operations. Iran, the report added, also alleged the United States was involved in the deaths of the Iranian pilgrims at the 1987 Hajj. Pointing to the 1983 and 1984 Beirut bombings, the CIA reported, “many Iranian leaders use this precedent as proof that terrorism can break U.S. resolve” and view “sabotage and terrorism as an important option in its confrontation with the United States in the Persian Gulf.”21
Following the accidental downing of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, the CIA warned that “Iranian-backed terrorists plan to attack U.S. facilities and personnel, and most posts have gone on a high state of alert, anticipating some sort of attack.”22 One intelligence report warned that terrorists supported by Iran could use the 1988 Seoul Olympics to carry out a bombing or hostage-taking operation targeting American, Iraqi, Saudi, and other Arab targets. Surprisingly, the report cautioned that “Iranian-backed terrorist groups also could act as surrogates for North Korea.”23 Those threats did not materialize, but Saudi Hezbollah did conduct a series of attacks targeting the Saudi petrochemical industry, which employed many Americans. In March 1988, Saudi Hezbollah claimed responsibility for an explosion at the Sadaf petrochemical plant in Jubayl. That attack involved a Hezbollah cell that included one former employee at the Sadaf plant and another, Ali Abdullah al-Khatim, who “fought with Hezbollah in Lebanon and received military training”—a trend that would apply to many of the Khobar Towers conspirators. More bombs exploded at the Ras Tanura refinery, while another apparently failed to detonate in Ras al-Juayma.24
Hezbollah Page 31