Month: November 2020

20 November 1979

Posted on by William Arkin
Grand Mosque of Mecca

 

An obscure but seminal event occurs, when a group of Saudi dissidents—alternately called “Sunni Muslims,” “Muslim fundamentalists,” “Shi’a vermin from Hasa,” and even “foreign agents”—attack the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.

Entering the walls of the mosque, some 200 rebels, mostly Saudis, but including Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis and Pakistanis take thousands hostage and barricade themselves inside. They call for the overthrow of the pro-Western Saudi government. It is an unprecedented event in Saudi history and the first mega-action by Islamic fundamentalists. And it is a seminal event for a young Osama bin Laden, who was reportedly shocked into a political awakening, one that became even more stark when a month later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, while the standoff between Saudi forces and the hostage takers was still going on.

After two weeks of negotiating, sniping and fighting, Saudi Arabia secretly brought in French counter-terrorism commandos to aid in a final assault on the mosque. The hostage takers and the hostages had moved underground into tunnels and catacombs. Reportedly using chemicals, the combined Saudi and French force mounted a final assault. Some 250 people were killed and 600 were wounded, and the battle left at least 25 Saudi soldiers and more than 100 rebels dead. After it was all over, some 65 rebels were publicly beheaded.

During the siege, thousands of Saudi Shi’a living in the eastern provinces took to the streets, inspired by the Grand Mosque attack. Riots broke out and Aramco facilities were attacked. It took Saudi authorities until mid-January to subdue the uprising.

An interesting outcome of the assault on the Grand Mosque is that the Saudi monarchy adopted conservative Wahhabism as the official ideology of the state, essentially implementing many of the positions of the insurgents. Women are prohibited from driving or appearing on television, music is forbidden, all stores and malls are closed during the five daily prayers. A royal decree also says that there were to be “no limits … put on expenditures for the propagation of Islam.” Saudi Arabia becomes—and is—the problem and the birthplace of 9/11.

19 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

FBI Director Louis Freeh announces that he is creating a new “Investigative Services Division” to “coordinate the FBI’s international activities, integrate and substantially strengthen its analytic capabilities, and oversee the Bureau’s crisis management functions.”

The reorganization is the beginning of a long road on the part of the Bureau to build up its intelligence capacities, a shift that did not really occur until after 9/11. The FBI’s importance as an intelligence producer was made all the more central given its role in investigating overseas terrorism strikes and in pursuing terrorist suspects in the United States, particularly in the terrorism expertise of the New York field office. But it saw its collection of information solely as part of building cases for prosecution and the “intelligence” derived was generally not shared with the rest of the government.

The post-9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry (p. 113) labeled the FBI’s “chronic inability to perform serious intelligence analysis,” even internally, as a problem. There have been many post-9/11 reorganizations of the FBI’s intelligence infrastructure, and field intelligence groups have been created in every field office. But ultimately the greatest impact—two decades later—is the FBI’s domestic intelligence apparatus that is focused on immediate and not “strategic” analysis. Much of that effort has little to do with terrorism, or at least with foreign terrorism.

18 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The CIA issues a compartmented top-secret report, “Further Options Available Against UBL” [Osama bin Laden], outlining covert and military actions that could be taken as a follow-on to the August 1998 cruise missile attacks (that were retaliation for the African embassy bombings).

White House staffers were still arguing for bombing a broad range of sites that would include al Qaeda camps and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan. Beyond air defenses and airfields, the Air Force said there weren’t any easy targets—that is, those which were outside urban areas or whose destruction would have significant effects. And the terrorist camps themselves were spread out and lacked critical facilities. Bomb damage assessments of the August strikes indicated no long-term effect.

According to Age of Sacred Terror (p. 284), national security advisor Sandy Berger was leery of bombing alone, believing that the odds of killing Osama bin Laden were low “and that a failure would make the United States look impotent and its target invincible.”

JCS Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton presented other military options, but his “$2 billion option” as the White House called it, was seen more as passive-aggressive refusal on the part of the Pentagon to engage in combat, piling on logistical and support requirements that turned every option into a major war. Secretary of Defense William Cohen also insisted that any special operations option—even of a small stealthy raid—include a “force protection” package. Ultimately the discussions fizzled into nothing.

17 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The CIA produces a top-secret intelligence report, “Usama Bin Ladin’s Finances: Some Estimates of Wealth, Income, and Expenditures,” that is unable to estimate the al Qaeda head’s wealth, nor where he was getting money from or how he moved it. The report said that bin Laden was getting financial support from his family in Saudi Arabia and other rich Gulf-based individuals.

In discussing the report, a National Security Council working group on terrorist finances asks the CIA to push again for access to a former al Qaeda official, Madani al Tayyib, who is in Saudi custody. The 9/11 Commission requests that the CIA use its back channels to see “if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Usama [sic] bin Ladin and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the Bin Ladin family.” (911 Commission, p. 122).

In September, Vice President Al Gore made a personal appeal to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for direct access to al Tayyib. Richard Clarke writes: “Upon learning that much of al Qaeda’s financing came from Saudi Arabia, both from individuals and from quasi-governmental charities, ‘We decided that we needed to have a serious talk with the Saudis as well as with a few of the financial centers in the region. We recognized that the Saudi regime had been largely uncooperative on previous law enforcement-focused investigations of terrorism … so we wanted a different approach … So we asked Vice President Gore to talk to the Crown Prince … We wanted to avoid a typical pattern of Saudi behavior we had seen: achingly slow progress, broken promises, denial, and cooperation limited to specific answers to specific questions … The Saudis protested our focus on continuing contacts between Usama and his wealthy, influential family, who were supposed to have broken off all ties with him. “How can you tell a mother not to call her son,” they asked. (Against all Enemies, pp. 194–195)

The United States never obtained direct access.

16 November 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
1001 Center Road in Venice, Florida

 

Amidst the extended 2000 recount for the presidential election in Florida, Lebanese Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, signs a lease for apartment 106 in the “Falls of Venice,” 1001 Center Road in Venice.

Jarrah had enrolled in a pilot training course at Florida Flight Training Center (FFTC) in Venice in March, entering the U.S. from Munich on June 27. He started flight school the next day, immediately violating his tourist immigration status. Jarrah leases the apartment as Ziad Samir, and on occasion Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi also stay in apartment 106. Though the FBI makes a meticulous reconstruction of Jarrah’s purchases, movements and whereabouts from his June 2000 entry to 9/11, where he lived before apartment 106 remains a mystery.

15 November 1997

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In a speech in Sacramento, California, President Bill Clinton portrays a bleak future if nations do not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Stopping the spread of nuclear materials and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands” is “fundamentally what is stake in the stand-off we’re having in Iraq today,” he says.

Clinton asked Americans not to view the current crisis as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

It is a good reminder that the WMD phantom—with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.—is perpetual and also, short of destroying Iraq and war, we are so unable to peacefully resolve the bigger question of proliferation in the most difficult cases.

14 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Saddam Hussein revokes his August 5 decision to cease cooperation with the United Nations inspectors (UNSCOM). Iraq states in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it is willing to resume inspections. But the U.S. and U.K. argue that the country imposes a number of unacceptable conditions with its offer, particularly restrictions on visiting presidential sites and including American inspectors. Capitulating, Iraq then informs the U.N. Security Council that it was the “clear and unconditional decision of the Iraqi government to resume cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA.”

As Iraq deliberates on resumption of inspections, an air and cruise missile operation (Desert Viper) is being prepared and even implemented: aircraft moving into place, armed, with targets selected. When Iraq notifies the Security Council, President Clinton aborts Desert Viper just minutes before the designated H-hour (11:00 AM EST).

In a televised address, President Clinton later says that Iraq has “backed down” and pledged full cooperation with UNSCOM. The president also makes clear that U.S. policy includes the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a prerequisite for resumption of normal relations. The UNSC accepts Iraq’s decision and issues a statement in which it stresses that Iraq’s commitment “needs to be established by unconditional and sustained cooperation with the Special Commission and the IAEA in exercising the full range of their activities provided for in their mandates.”

The U.S. and U.K. then threaten that without full cooperation, they will strike Iraq without warning. According to the Iraq Survey Group, the events of 1998 “had so poisoned the atmosphere with UNSCOM that the relationship could not be repaired.” It was the end of inspections and the beginning of the road to certain war, but also not the last time that a president stopped an underway bombing operation, President Trump doing so vis-à-vis Iran.

13 November 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
The Office of Personnel Management/Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM/SANG) in downtown Riyadh is bombed.

 

In probably the first al Qaeda attack against the United States, an obscure U.S. military outpost, the Office of Personnel Management/Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM/SANG) in downtown Riyadh is attacked, killing six Americans and two East Indian contractors. The 300 lb. bomb was detonated outside the small building housing U.S. military and contractor personnel overseeing the massive U.S. military assistance program.

“Despite demands from Washington that U.S. officials be kept informed, the Saudis quickly shut the door on its investigation.” (Age of Sacred Terror, p. 132). Something called the Islamic Movement of Change took responsibility, an organization thought to be connected to (or inspired by) Osama bin Laden.

“In this case especially, the Saudis, who are secretive by nature, didn’t want foreign police agencies poking into their internal affairs. Indeed their Minister of the Interior compiled a list of several hundred suspects culled from nearly 15,000 files of Saudi nationals who’d fought in or supported the Afghan War.” (The Cell, pp. 149–150).

Four suspects were eventually and officially apprehended, though FBI investigators are denied direct access to them, with those suspects then secretly tried and publicly executed. In the words of Lawrence Wright, “The men read their nearly identical confessions on Saudi television, admitting that they had been influenced by reading bin Laden’s speeches and those of other prominent dissidents. They then were taken to a public square and beheaded.” (Looming Tower, p. 211)

The following people were killed in the terrorist attack on OPM-SANG’s headquarters: Sgt. 1st Class David K. Warrell, James H. Allen, Alaric J. Brozovsky, William L. Combs, Jr., Tracy V. Henley, Wayne P. Wiley, Eyakunnath Balakrishnan, and Thermal B. Devadas. Both Balakrishnan and Devadas were cooks in the building’s cafeteria.

12 November 1994

Posted on by William Arkin
Corregidor, Philippines

 

Wandering around the globe, oblivious to everything terrorism and Islam going on around him, Bill Clinton lands in the Philippines on a two-day state visit, visiting Corregidor, site of the Japanese victory in the conquest of the American commonwealth in World War II, and of the U.S. Army’s return.

While in the Philippines, what are now believed to be al Qaeda operatives (including Ramzi Yousef) undertake surveillance of the presidential party, preparing for an assassination attempt on Clinton’s life. The 911 Commission says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent $3,000 to Yousef to fund the plot.

According to Triple Cross (p. 163), Yousef and associate Wali Khan Amin Shah applied for visas on November 3 and travel to Manila (Khan would later be captured and tortured by Philippine police and then “rendered” to the United States). Triple Cross claims that Terry Nichols, accomplice in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was also in the Philippines at the same time.

Clinton arrived in the country after a visit to Saudi Arabia, where he met with King Fahd at King Khalid Military City in Hafr-Al-Batin in the north, near the Iraqi border. “I had been impressed by Fahd’s call, in early 1993, asking me to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims,” Clinton later writes (My Life, p. 627).

It was hardly a humanitarian move on the Saudi part. Bosnia would be one of the first locations outside Afghanistan where radical Islamists and al Qaeda adherents would travel to and carry out jihad, and Osama bin Laden certainly saw the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia as part of the global assault on the Islamic people.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban have their first significant military success, capturing Kandahar in the south. It all happened in November 1994, all the threads gathering, but the global pattern was unseen at the time.

11 November 1996

Posted on by William Arkin
Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl

 

The FBI first interviews Jamal al-Fadl and is taken on quite a ride.

The Sudanese national Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl walked into the U.S. Embassy in Asmara, Eritrea in June 1996, claiming that he was a secretary and fixer for Osama bin Laden in Sudan. As the FBI would later tell the story to Lawrence Wright, al-Fadl embezzled $110,000 from al Qaeda; when bin Laden found out about it, and al-Fadl begged for forgiveness, bin Laden said the money would have to be returned. Fadl flees. He attempts to become an agent for Saudi Arabia and even Israel before he lands with the FBI. (Looming Tower, p. 197)

As the story goes, al-Fadl had lived in Brooklyn and was connected to the Al-Kifah Center, then the radical mosque linked to the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman.

After a long vetting process in Germany, al-Fadl began to tell the FBI of al Qaeda’s worldwide organization, activities, and finances. He is such a valuable source, he is moved to the U.S. under witness protection, and in New Jersey, “junior”—as the FBI handlers called him—spills on everything from plots known and unknown to al Qaeda’s supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. That little tidbit rockets his information to the White House.

Though the WMD report would receive wide circulation—and would influence the U.S. cruise missile attack in Sudan two years later—according to Wright (who is always complimentary of the FBI), outside of a small circle of FBI specialists and prosecutors, Fadl’s reports engender little interest. (Looming Tower, p. 242)

George Tenet says in his autobiography (At the Center of the Storm, p. 102) that al-Fadl (whom he doesn’t name) “told us that UBL [bin Laden] was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he wanted to strike the United States on our soil. We learned that al Qaeda had attempted to acquire material that could be used to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capability. He had gone so far as to hire an Egyptian physicist to work on nuclear and chemical projects in Sudan.”

Oh, and al-Fadl won the New Jersey Lottery. He is still thought to be in witness protection.