25 December 1979

Posted on December 25, 2020January 30, 2021 by William Arkin

Over a three-day period, beginning near midnight on Christmas Eve, four Soviet Army motorized rifle divisions invade Afghanistan as Soviet special forces seize airports in Kabul. The communist, exiled leader Babrak Karmal is installed as president.

It is the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, but also the birth of a new brand of Islamic fundamentalism not based on animus towards Israel. Over the next decade of fighting—devastating to Afghanistan and to Afghan fighters—al Qaeda is born. The CIA’s decade-long, covert-action support for the war against the Soviets reportedly involves billions in arms and support, much of it funneled through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Arab migration to the fight—the holy jihad supported by a young Osama bin Laden—does not really get underway for another five years, but then thousands of volunteers make the holy pilgrimage to Afghanistan to fight the foreign invader, some joining al Qaeda as it later forms (in 1988) and some just jihadi tourists who return to their home countries of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

22 December 1989

Posted on December 22, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama bin Laden approaches Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, head of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, with a plan to use Arab mujahedin from Afghanistan to overthrow the Marxist government in South Yemen.

Turki rejects his proposal, but bin Laden reportedly organizes fighters anyhow under the al Qaeda flag, and then (working with tribal leaders) makes a series of attacks in South Yemen. The attacks are so damaging and threatening that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travels to Saudi Arabia to ask King Fahd to get bin Laden under control. The King then himself instructs bin Laden to stay out of Yemeni affairs, and Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Saud (then the minister of the interior) demands bin Laden’s passport.

Less than a year later, Iraq invades Kuwait and bin Laden’s views of Saudi Arabia are forever transformed, with King Fahd inviting U.S. military forces to deploy to Saudi soil—a sacrilege to bin Laden that represents a new set of “crusaders” entering the lands of Islam.

13 December 1998

Posted on December 13, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

FBI director Louis Freeh briefs White House national security advisor Sandy Berger about the conclusion that Iran and Hizballah were behind the terrorist attack at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

According to Freeh, Berger asks, “Who knows about this,” saying the Bureau’s conclusions seem to be hearsay. Later, Berger convenes a meeting including Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry (Hugh) Shelton, and CIA director George Tenet.

Freeh writes: “I thought that we were meeting to discuss what our next move would be, given the fact that we now had solid evidence that Iranians, with involvement at the highest official levels, had blown up nineteen Americans. But I was wrong. The meeting started with how to deal with the press and Congress, should news of Iranian involvement in the Khobar murders leak outside of the room.”

Freeh says that Shelton invited him to the ‘tank’ at the Pentagon to brief the Joint Chiefs on Iranian sponsorship. There, Marine Corps commandant Chuck Krulak said he would do whatever was necessary to bring the Khobar bombers to justice, “even if that meant taking on the White House.” (My FBI, pp. 29ff) Nothing was really ever done. The Iran connection faded into history.

26 November 1996

Posted on November 26, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Saudi citizen Hani Hanjour, who would go on to pilot the plane that attacked the Pentagon, departs the United States for Saudi Arabia. He had been living in Scottsdale, Arizona and attending flight training, where he was hoping to become a commercial airline pilot.

Hanjour was the only one of the four 9/11 hijackers who had been to the United States prior to June 2000. He lived in the U.S. in October 1991 and enrolled in English language school in Tucson. He then returned in 1996, arriving in New York on April 2, living for a month in Florida before moving to Oakland, California, where he attended English language school at the ELS Language Center at Holy Names College (3510 Mountain Boulevard in Oakland, CA) from May until August 1996.

Though the 9/11 plot didn’t begin until much later—and Hanjour was the last of the pilots to join the group—his earlier residence and travel in the United States (and his attending flight school) never attracted the attention of any authorities or the intelligence community, such was the blind trust given over to Saudi citizens.

20 November 1979

Posted on November 20, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

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.

17 November 1998

Posted on November 17, 2020December 23, 2020 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.

13 November 1995

Posted on November 13, 2020December 23, 2020 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 November 12, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

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.

7 November 2000

Posted on November 7, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Saudi Arabia opens a border-crossing point with Iraq to facilitate Saudi exports to Iraq under the U.N. “oil for food” program. The land border had been closed between the two countries since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Since at least 1998 (when U.N. inspectors were ejected from the country), sanctions against Iraq had been crumbling, prominent countries like France and Russia increasingly contracting with Baghdad, commercial air travel restored, and illicit trade increasing.

There’s no evidence now that much weapons-of-mass-destruction materials flowed into the country between 1998 and 9/11, but the general crumbling of sanctions worried Washington that indeed Saddam would escape from “the box” he’d been put in.

Colin Powell in particular as Secretary of State in the new administration would seek to reinvigorate sanctions with his proposed “smart sanctions” regime. But the program never got off the ground before 9/11 and then certain war with Iraq loomed.

25 September 2000

Posted on September 25, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the United Airlines plane that hit the Pentagon, returns to the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and makes a second application for an American student visa. An earlier visa application (on September 10) had been denied because, though Hanjour applied for a B-1/B-2 business/tourist visa, he stated that he intended to attend school.

The consulate told him he’d have to reapply. This time, Hanjour states a desire to attend English language school at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California.

The 911 Commission found that Hanjour had been issued an F (student) visa in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia passport #C241922. But a complete search of his records indicated that he had already received an approved change of status to attend this same English language school in 1996. That earlier approval of visa status was granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) while Hanjour was earlier in the United States. In these days before computer networks and information sharing, the consulate had no record of the earlier application (a likely cause for disqualification if he was deemed to have shown deception).