Saudi bulldozing of the Kobar Tower remains stopped only after Scott Erskine, a supervisory FBI agent for international terrorism investigations, threatened that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia when the bomb exploded, would intervene personally on the matter.
U.S. intelligence then intercepted communications from the highest levels of the Saudi government, including interior minister Prince Nayef, to the governor and other officials of Eastern Province instructing them to go through the motions of cooperating with U.S. officials on their investigation but to obstruct it at every turn.
Freeh allowed Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to convince him that Iran was involved in the bombing, and that President Bill Clinton, for whom he had formed a visceral dislike, "had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers," as Freeh wrote in his memoirs.
The Khobar Towers investigation soon became Freeh's vendetta against Clinton. "Freeh was pursuing this for his own personal agenda," says former FBI agent Jack Cloonan.
A former high-ranking FBI official recalls that Freeh "was always meeting with Bandar". And many of the meetings were not in Freeh's office but at Bandar's 38-room home in McLean, Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Saudis were refusing the most basic FBI requests for cooperation. When Ray Mislock, who headed the National Security Division of the FBI's Washington Field Office, requested permission to go door to door to interview witnesses in the neighbourhood, the Saudis refused.
"The Washington Field Office was hypersensitive and told us to f*ck off," said agent Cloonan.
The CIA's bin Laden unit, which had only been established in early 1996, was also excluded by CIA leadership from that Agency's work on the bombing.
In September 1996, bin Laden's former business agent Jamal Al-Fadl, who had left al Qaeda over personal grievances, walked into the U.S. embassy in Eritrea and immediately began providing the best intelligence the United States had ever gotten on bin Laden and al Qaeda.
But the CIA and FBI made no effort take advantage of his knowledge to get information on possible al Qaeda involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing, according to Dan Coleman, one of al-Fadl's FBI handlers.
"We were never given any questions to ask him about Khobar Towers," says Coleman.
This is the first of a five-part series, "Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden". The series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Excerpted from Gareth Porter @ Counterpunch
