Hezbollah (43 page)

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.
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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.
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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
.
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Carrying at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives, the tanker truck detonated with the power of about 20,000 pounds of TNT.
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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.
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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.
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Nineteen US Air Force personnel were killed in the attack, and another 372 Americans were wounded.
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A number of Saudi citizens unfortunate enough to be in the nearby park at the time of the bombing were also killed.
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The wounded included Saudi, Bangladeshi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Indonesian, and Filipino citizens as well.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.”
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The following month Saudi Hezbollah announced plans to attack US and Saudi interests worldwide.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Saudi authorities responded forcefully, arresting suspected Shi’a militants and engaging in one standoff with three members of Saudi Hezbollah that left a number of Saudi policemen killed or injured. The three militants and another cell member were arrested and later publicly beheaded.
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Meanwhile, Saudi intelligence officers were dispatched abroad to pursue some twenty more Saudi Hezbollah operatives thought to have fled the kingdom.
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To avenge the deaths of its beheaded operatives, Saudi Hezbollah embarked on an assassination campaign abroad, including attacks on Saudi officials in Turkey, Pakistan, and Thailand. Commenting on one of these assassinations, a CIA analysis issued in December 1988 noted that “Riyadh is concerned that the assassination of a Saudi diplomat in Ankara on 25 October may be the opening round in a Shi’a
terrorist campaign targeting Saudi officials and facilities.”
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At this early time, however, the CIA suspected the group was active only outside Saudi Arabia: “We suspect the groups claiming responsibility for the assassination use a number of names interchangeably, including ‘Hizballah of the Hijaz’ and ‘Islamic Jihad of the Hijaz.’ No evidence has appeared, however, that Hizballah of the Hijaz is a functioning organization inside Saudi Arabia. The group has surfaced only in connection with claims or threats made in support of Saudi Shi’a dissidents or Iranian pressure on Saudi Arabia.”
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Then, in July 1989, a group of Kuwaiti and Saudi Shi’a affiliated with Hezbollah al-Kuwait—the parallel Hezbollah element Iran created in Kuwait, as it had done elsewhere in the Gulf—were caught smuggling explosives into the kingdom and placing them in the vicinity of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. In September, sixteen Kuwaitis and four Saudis were beheaded for their roles in the plot, prompting Saudi and Kuwaiti Hezbollah to issue a call for vengeance at a press conference in Beirut, where they could speak freely in the company and protection of their Lebanese affiliate and mentor, Lebanese Hezbollah. Two months later they would claim responsibility for the assassination of a Saudi diplomat in Beirut using the “Holy War Organization” name long affiliated with Hezbollah. Already in the 1980s Saudi Shi’a extremists were fighting with Lebanese Hezbollah against Israel in southern Lebanon. Some Saudi Hezbollah members received training in Iran or Lebanon from the late 1980s onward, often using Damascus and the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine as a transfer hub and as cover for travel between Saudi Arabia and these training camps.
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Several of the Khobar bombing conspirators were recruited there, according to US prosecutors, who described the system this way: “The young men would frequently have their first contact with Saudi Hizballah during religious pilgrimages to the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine. There, they would be approached by Saudi Hizballah members to gauge their loyalty to Iran and dislike for the government of Saudi Arabia. Young men who wished to join Saudi Hizballah then would be transported to Hizballah-controlled areas in Lebanon for military training and indoctrination.”
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Investigators determined that the Khobar conspirators held a key planning meeting at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine in June 1995, just days before the attack.
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A month after the Hajj, in August 1989 Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president of Iran. Though he would later attempt rapprochement with Riyadh, complicating the investigation into the Khobar Towers bombing, attacks targeting Saudi interests resumed under Rafsanjani’s leadership following the execution of the Kuwaiti Shi’a responsible for the July attack at the Hajj. Several of the executed Kuwaitis were of Iranian origin, and Iranian leaders called for these martyrs’ deaths to be avenged with attacks targeting Saudi, Kuwaiti, and US interests. A CIA analysis published in August 1990 assessed that “these statements may have encouraged radical Shia elements to carry out a series of attacks against Saudi facilities and personnel.” The CIA assessed that Iranian terrorist attacks carried out over the past year “were probably approved in advance” by the president and other senior Iranian leaders.
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