Replies

Rich Lowry

November 03, 2003, 7:53 a.m.
Clinton & Khobar

snip

A fraught three-way tug-of-war began over the investigation into the bombing between the Saudis, who didn't want the U.S. to get at the truth in the case; the FBI, which was determined to ascertain the facts and suspicious of the motives of the White House; and the White House, which loathed its FBI director and was lukewarm about pursuing the case.

The pattern of Saudi non-cooperation had been set after the Riyadh bombing, when the Saudis denied FBI agents access to four suspects, and swiftly beheaded them to lend finality to that lack of access.

snip

The Saudis may have refused cooperation not just because — as is often argued — they feared that the United States would lash out and bomb Iran in retaliation, but because they wanted to obscure the role of prominent Saudis in the emerging terrorist network.

If the Saudis feared U.S. military retaliation against Iran, they clearly didn't know with whom they were dealing. While the investigation into the murder of 19 Americans in an Iranian-backed operation was ongoing, the Clinton administration began a campaign to woo Teheran. It is difficult to warm relations with a regime at the same time as pursuing its connections to terror. So by 1998 the administration appeared prepared to forgive and forget Khobar Towers.

"American officials," writes Madeleine Albright biographer Thomas W. Lippman, "stopped saying in public that they suspected Iran of responsibility for the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Air Force residential compound in Saudi Arabia." The administration softened the State Department warning about travel to Iran, waived sanctions against foreign oil firms doing business there, and removed it from the list of major exporters of illegal drugs.

Iran was determinedly, and predictably, unmoved, because anti-Americanism was close to the core of the regime. The administration then deployed its big gun: a soupy, let's-all-get-along near-apology to the Iranians from the president of the United States, which had been a longtime demand of the Teheran terror regime. President Clinton's statement in April 1999, while the FBI was still trying to unravel the Iranian terror plot, ranks among the most shameful things he ever said in office.

snip

The outreach to Iran was exactly at variance with Clinton's rhetoric immediately after the Khobar attack. "The cowards who committed this murderous act," Clinton said upon learning of the bombing, "must not go unpunished. Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own." Clinton made his semi-apology to Iran before officially requesting its cooperation in the Khobar case, which he did only in October 1999 and never backed up with international pressure.

FBI director Louis Freeh, and those around him, began to suspect that the administration didn't care that much about finding the perpetrators because if connections with Iran were established it would be forced to take, or at least consider, action against Iran. This meant that getting to the bottom of the case would present what the administration hated most: a difficulty, a risk.

"It was hard," says Dale Watson, who was executive assistant director of the FBI for counterterrorism and counterintelligence. "It was hard because of the question: What would you do if there was a state sponsor behind this?" Instead of lapsing into its default mode of attempting to placate a country like Iran, the administration would have been forced at least to talk tough, and perhaps think about doing something about it. "It was an attitude of look the other way," says retired Special Forces Gen. Wayne Downing, who led a Pentagon review of the bombing in 1996.

"Director Freeh was the only one in Washington," says former chief of the international-terrorism division of the FBI Mike Rolince, "pushing for direct access to suspects, pushing for records, pushing for identities of the people, wanting this investigation to succeed. We got a lot of lip service from people who said that they were behind us, but we knew for a fact that when certain Saudi officials came into town and it was the right time to push them for things the Bureau wanted, we know from other people that the issue wasn't even raised. It was crystal clear to some of us that they were hoping that this whole thing would just go away."

In a meeting that was supposed to be devoted to pressuring the Saudis on Khobar, Clinton got weepy when Crown Prince Abdullah expressed support for him in the Lewinsky affair and didn't push the Saudi hard. Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar told Freeh that the White House wanted to avoid confrontation with Iran at all costs, even if it meant ignoring the Khobar Towers attack. For its part, the White House thought Freeh was out of control and trying to make U.S. foreign policy. "We weren't out of control," says Dale Watson, "we were working extremely hard to collect information and evidence that we could use possibly to charge and prosecute people with."

snip

"What the administration did was latch onto law enforcement as a way of showing that they were doing something," says former CIA director Jim Woolsey. "

snip

In the Khobar case, the law-enforcement approach itself risked creating pressure for a military strike. The White House was therefore angered when Freeh — the head of its lead agency in the fight against terror, whose job it was to pursue the facts — pursued the facts.

When Freeh told national security adviser Sandy Berger there was evidence to indict several suspects, Berger asked, "Who else knows this?" He then proceeded to question the evidence. A reporter for The New Yorker who later interviewed Freeh about the case writes that the FBI Director thought "Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing."

The price of not getting to the bottom of the matter — although the Saudis opened up somewhat in response to Freeh's proddings and allowed the questioning of suspects — wasn't just shrugging off the murderer of 19 Americans. It was failing to understand fully the changing nature of the terror threat. "Khobar provided the keys that unlocked the new terror world," says one terror expert. "Everything you needed to know about the new terror network, the cooperation between all the different sects and factions, the rise of Wahhabi radicalism in Saudi Arabia, the changing dynamic of the Middle East — it all was present in that case."

snip

An attack against American servicemen abroad was not merely a crime. It was an act of war. As Louis Freeh later put it, "Khobar represented a national security threat far beyond capability or authority of the FBI or Department of Justice to address. Neither the FBI Director nor the Attorney General could or should decide America's response to such a grave threat."

The Khobar bombing should have prompted severe consequences for both Saudi Arabia, for its financial support for the growing terror network, and Iran, for its direct involvement in the attack. But the Clinton administration couldn't bring itself to change the basis of its relationship with Saudi Arabia, or to punish Iran, which actually got softer treatment after Khobar.

http://tinyurl.com/aofzr