Prince Saud’s Tit for Tat – A Spurious Exercise

Saudi foreign minister Saud al Faisal’s disclosure to the Washington 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 the US 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 Khobar Towers 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 Khobar Towers 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 Khobar Tower 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 Khobar Towers 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.