Exposing the Saudi Coverup

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Prince Saud's Tit for Tat - A Spurious Exercise

DEBKAfile Special Analysis, 12 August, 2002

 

Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal's disclosure to theWashington

Post of Sunday - August 11, that Iran had expelled to Saudi Arabia

16 al Qaeda fighters - was Riyadh's riposte for the damaging

briefing presented recently by a Rand Corp analyst to a Pentagon

advisory board. The briefing described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of

the United States, charging the Saudis with being "active at every

level of the terror chain from planners to financiers, from cadre to

foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader."

The Rand analyst, Laurent Murawiec, urged Washington to threaten to

seize Saudi oil fields and overseas financial assets if the Saudis

refused to desist from this activity.

The Pentagon and White House quickly disowned the briefing, but not

before the association registered. In 1979, the Carter

administration froze Iran's financial assets in retaliation for the

seizure of theUS embassy in Tehran and the taking of its staff

hostage.

Dismissing the briefing as "ridiculous", the Saudi foreign minister

rapped out the following points:

A. In June, 2002, Iran expelled to Saudi Arabia 16 al Qaeda fighters

who sought refuge after fleeing from Afghanistan - knowing that

whatever intelligence was obtained from them in Saudi interrogation

would be passed on to the United States for use in the war against

terrorism. The al Qaeda group was delivered after Saudi officials

led by a senior intelligence official traveled to Tehran in May.

"We asked (the Iranians) to hand them over and they did," said the

prince.

B. Iran has not only cooperated with Saudi Arabia in the conflict

with Afghanistan but cooperated extensively with the United States.

"The US and Iran can speak for themselves on how much cooperation

happened between the two countries," he said.

C. All the information Saudi Arabia has on al Qaeda has been

exchanged with the United States. Saudi intelligence sharing with

Washington, he stressed, is just one example of US-Saudi cooperation

that is brokered through a five-year old joint counter-terrorism

committee, whose work has intensified in the past 10 months (i.e

since 9/11).

To underline his assertion, Prince Saud noted that his brother,

Prince Turki al Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence, had

stated in a separate interview that combating a Qaeda had topped the

committee's agenda for years.

D. The work of this committee refutes accusations in Washington

that the kingdom foments terrorism through its sponsorship of

Islamic schools and mosques worldwide.

E. In particular, the prince attacked the charge by Sens. Joseph I.

Lieberman and Arlen Specter that ostensible Saudi humanitarian aid

has been diverted to groups responsible for suicide bombings in

Israel. He called the charges baseless and accused the senators of

not checking their facts. For example, the kingdom had extended

hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority, which

is also a major recipient of aid from the European Union.

According to the Saudi foreign minister, al Qaeda is a sworn enemy

of the Saudi government that wants to crush the ruling monarchy and

sever the country's relations with the United States.

"It would be the ultimate of contradictions that we finance those

who are trying to do harm to our country," he declared.

"Saudi officials" contributed to the Prince Saudi interview by

revealing:

1. Since last year, the Saudi authorities have questioned 2,000 to

3,000 Saudis who had been to Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya and

were suspected of having participated in wars there.

2. Of that group, 200 remain in custody and are very cooperative.

3. These prisoners are providing information about divisions within

al Qaeda over the future direction of the network and the legitimacy

of orders to strike any and all targets worldwide, including

installations where Muslims are likely to be killed.

One Saudi official said: "There is a breakdown in command."

DEBKAfile's sources and experts expose some of the reality carefully

left out of the Saudi foreign minister's arguments.

Their central feature is the close analogy he draws between Saudi-US

and Iranian-US cooperation in the fight against terrorism and his

emphasis on its usefulness to Washington.

This analogy reflects a different kind of close cooperation that

Saud has never admitted to the American public. It goes back six

years. On June 25, 1996, a truck bomb devastated the KhobarTowers

living quarters of US forces and their families, mostly pilots, who

were posted in Dahran to protect Saudi oil fields. The blast killed

19 US servicemen and left 500 injured, some gravely.

DEBKAfile's intelligence and anti-terror sources have known for some

time that Saudi intelligence had by the end of August, early

September, found out exactly who was behind the attack: Iran - or

rather Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But that was

not all they discovered; the bombers were Saudi al Qaeda operatives

controlled by the Iranian leadership through two senior members of

Khamenei's private intelligence-cum-terror apparatus: the notorious

Imad Mughniye, currently in south Lebanon in command of Hizballah

and al Qaeda fighting forces, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards

Brigadier General Ahmed Sharifi.

Mughniyeh figures prominently on the FBI's 22 most wanted terrorist

list. The much-sought Beirut hostage-taker of the nineteen eighties

is linked more recently to the planning and execution of the 1998 US

embassy bombings in East Africa and later to the September 11 hijack-

attacks in New York and Washington.

Sharifi, according to our counter-terror sources, is the chief

coordinator of military training courses for overseas recruits at

the main Revolutionary Guards base in northern Iran.

In October 1996, soon after the Saudis caught on to the plot, the

former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani landed in the kingdom on

a pilgrimage to Mecca. Rafsanjani, now a leading adherent of the

anti-US line in Tehran, took the opportunity then for arranging with

the Saudis a lasting cover-up of Iran's hand in the bombing

disaster. A secret accord was signed by Rafsanjani and the same

Saudi foreign minister, who claimed this week to the Washington

Post that he was a fervent advocate of cooperation with Washington.

DEBKAfile presents the highlights of that clandestine pact for the

first time:

a. Saudi Arabia will never communicate to a third party, notably

the United States, any of its findings on the KhobarTowers

investigation or any other information on Iran's involvement in

terrorist operations.

b. Iran in return undertakes to refrain from terrorist acts or

incitement to terror in the Saudi kingdom, especially in the Shiite

Eastern Provinces (where the Saudi oil fields are also located).

c. Iran and Saudi Arabia offer reciprocal safeguards for each other'

s interests.

d. Iran promises to come to Saudi Arabia's aid against an Iraqi

attack; Saudi Arabia pledges assistance to Iran against an Iraqi or

American attack.

In the six years since this pact was signed, both parties have

scrupulously abided by its provisions.

In June 2001, five months before the September 11 attacks, Louis

Freeh resigned as director of the FBI. One of his last acts was to

draw up indictments against the 14 men suspected of committing the

Dahran bombing – 13 Saudis and 1 Lebanese. Senior American officials

had no doubts at the time of Iran's involvement, but their inquiries

were always brought up short. Freeh complained that never in the

course of his five-year investigation into the affair had he

received Saudi cooperation, nor had American investigators been

allowed to question or access the suspects.

Nothing has changed since then. The Saudis still deny US access to

the KhobarTower suspects. The true state of Saudi-US cooperation is

therefore quite different from Prince Saud's depiction.

The main point of this account, according to our counter-terror

experts, is this:

The Khobar Towers bombing was a turning point in the progression of

anti-American terrorism; it was the first large-scale attack to be

carried out by a fledgling coalition binding al Qaeda, the

Hizballah, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Iranian-Lebanese

terror master Imad Mughniyeh. As one of their earliest joint

ventures, the Dahran operation taught the partners-in-terror

valuable lessons that were applied in subsequent major terror

attacks against the United States.

That 13 of the 14 perpetrators were Saudi is no more fortuitous than

that 15 of the 19 hijackers of September 11 were nationals of the

oil kingdom.

Had Saudi leaders been as keen on their five-year cooperation with

the United States in its fight against terror as the Saudi foreign

minister claims, they would have permitted American investigators to

question the suspects detained after the KhobarTowers attack. This

might have thrown a spanner in the terrorists' planning for the 9/11

in New York and Washington. However, the Saudis made do with passing

on only select fragments of the investigative material, which lacked

the answers to pertinent questions and accusations. There was no way

of knowing how much the Saudis were keeping back.

On the Iranian side of the purported cooperation, DEBKAfile's

counter-terror and intelligence sources offer another unpublished

discovery:

The 16 al Qaeda fighters, whom the Saudi foreign minister claims

Iran extradited, came from the lowliest ranks of the network, and

had little knowledge of its workings outside their own fighting

cells. They would have known nothing about a breakdown in command.

According to our sources, they were selected from a large group of

400 to 5000 Saudi al Qaeda fighters hidden in a well-protected

Iranian Revolutionary Guards camp in the northeastern province of

Khorasan near the Afghan border. Among this group, is a kernel of 5

to 7 high-ranking Saudi al Qaeda commanders.

Tehran did not hand this group over to Riyadh and therefore the

Saudis did not make them available for American investigators'

questioning – even in the presence of Saudi security officers.

Therefore, Prince Saud's claims of five years of cooperation on the

part of Riyadh and Tehran do not hold water. The episode of the 16

al Qaeda fighters is rather evidence that the Saud-Rafsanjani five-

year cover-up is as robust as ever.