-Caveat Lector-
New Yorker
May 14, 2001
Pg. 68
Annals Of Politics
Louis Freeh's Last Case
(Pt. 4 of 4, conclusion)
IV
On December 11, 1997, Freeh drove to the F.B.I.'s
training academy in Quantico, Virginia. He had invited
the families of the nineteen men who were killed at
Khobar to join him there to talk about the case. For
three days, Freeh met with the families and shared all
their meals with them. "He was there morning, noon,
and night," said Fran Heiser, whose
thirty-five-year-old son, Michael, a master sergeant,
had been killed in the blast. At one point, standing
near a scale model of Building 131 and the crater,
Freeh told the families that he was committed to doing
everything he could to find out who was responsible
and to bring them to justice. He gave a slide show on
the known suspects. Some of the families were angry
that the Saudis hadn't provided more information and
that the Administration hadn't pushed them harder.
Heiser said that someone demanded, "Why do we allow
them to get away with murder?" Freeh said that he was
committed to the truth. "I am not a politician. I am a
policeman," he said repeatedly.
When I asked Freeh about the meeting in Quantico, it
was a late afternoon in October. It had grown dark
while we spoke, and Freeh walked me to my car. "What
they wanted to hear from some person and not some
institution was that these nineteen lives were very
important collectively and individually and that this
was a case that was going to be pursued," he said.
"I've talked to victims and survivors for years in
different things that I have done. But what was very
different about this was that I was very impressed
with the dignity and discipline of these families. Of
course, these are military families. There weren't any
recriminations. There wasn't any anger. . . . What
they wanted to know was that somebody would follow the
case and be faithful to it and not give it up."
At the time of Freeh's session in Quantico, there were
new signs of moderation in Iran. After a public
interview in which President Khatami condemned
terrorism and suggested that there be more contact
between Iranian and American citizens, an American
wrestling team visited Iran. Clinton extended a
reciprocal invitation, and the State Department urged
waiving a regulation requiring the fingerprinting of
all visiting Iranians. Freeh objected; one of the team
members was a suspected intelligence agent. "The
F.B.I. saw these teams as Trojan horses," Berger told
me. In a meeting with Albright and Reno, Berger sided
with Albright.
Freeh knew that the Administration wanted to give
Khatami a chance to control Iran's intelligence
services, but he was also listening to Dale Watson,
the F.B.I. anti-terrorism chief, who believed that
Iran's new secular leader would turn out to be a
puppet of Ayatollah Khamenei. He wondered what kind of
signal it sent to pursue a criminal investigation and
make diplomatic overtures at the same time. "We said
this in no way means we're not going to go after
Khobar," Berger insisted. "These two policies weren't
in conflict."
In many ways, the argument between Berger and Freeh
was a very old one-a dispute between a pragmatist and
a moralist, similar to the debate over establishing
favorable trade status with China while condemning
human-rights violations, or, for that matter, pursuing
a friendly alliance with Saddam Hussein in the years
just before the Gulf War. The collision between the
demands of law enforcement and those of diplomacy
intensified the conflict. Freeh believed that the
Clinton Administration had compromised itself in an
unforgivable way by seeming to waver in its commitment
to resolving the bombing case. In mid-June, when
Madeleine Albright, speaking at the Asia Society in
New York, said that the recent changes in Iran created
a "historic opportunity" to end twenty years of
hostile relations, the F.B.I. became even more
distrustful.
"It's possible that there was a communication
breakdown," Berger acknowledged to me. "But the facts
are-and this is fundamental-in every way we were asked
to do and ways we were not asked to do we pressed the
Saudis. Does that mean we weren't trying to make some
outreach to Iran? No. There are two governments in
Iran, and our fundamental policy was to try to support
and strengthen the reformists . . . so there would be
no more Khobars." Over the summer of 1998, the number
of F.B.I. agents stationed in Saudi Arabia dropped
from dozens to a single legal attaché.
That summer concluded a series of dismal months for
the Clinton Administration, beginning with the reports
in January that Kenneth Starr, the independent
counsel, was looking into the President's relationship
with a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. On
August 7th, terrorists attacked the United States
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two
hundred and fifty people and injuring more than five
thousand. About four hundred F.B.I. agents were sent
to the sites to gather evidence, which pointed to
Osama bin Laden, the millionaire Saudi exile and
leader of a terrorist network. The Administration
began planning a missile strike against a suspected
bin Laden terrorist training camp in Afghanistan as
well as against a pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan
thought to be manufacturing chemical-warfare
materials. Freeh, who was scheduled to go to Kenya and
Tanzania, privately urged that any retaliatory strike
be delayed. "My fear always is that these attacks
occur and then the real attack is designed for when
the hundred F.B.I. people show up," he told me. Freeh
had just arrived in Kenya when he learned that
Tomahawk missiles would be launched within forty-five
minutes.
Three days earlier, Clinton had given grand-jury
testimony in which, after months of denial, he
admitted to a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. Bear
Bryant, who was by then second-in-command, feared for
Freeh's safety. He was suspicious about the timing of
the air strikes, believing that Clinton had wanted to
divert attention from the Lewinsky affair. Bryant
called Reno. "I thought it was a very dangerous thing
to do," Bryant said. "I told her I thought it was as
crazy as hell. I was very strident. She didn't
disagree. She also thought they shouldn't do it. But
nothing could be done to stop it, because it was a
done deal. I got off the phone and started arranging
transport for everyone to get the hell out of there if
need be."
Freeh was not directly involved in the Starr
investigation, but he had been kept informed. (When
Starr left his post, Freeh wrote to thank him, saying,
"We have all been greatly impressed with your
sacrifice, persistence, and uncompromising personal
and professional integrity.") Freeh insisted that
F.B.I. investigations involving the White House did
not spring from animus but, rather, from what he saw
as his duty to protect the Bureau's independence. He
even thought that Starr's pursuit of the Lewinsky case
was a diversion from more urgent matters, in
particular the alleged involvement of China in the
1996 campaign. When the House released Starr's report,
in September, Freeh thought back on his first meeting
with Clinton, at which the President had talked to him
about the importance of family. Most people, Freeh
thought, would have fled the White House in
embarrassment. By that time, he had not spoken with
the President for two years.
Two weeks after the Starr report, Crown Prince
Abdullah arrived in Washington from Saudi Arabia; for
six days, his entourage took over the
hundred-and-forty-three-room Hay-Adams Hotel, near the
White House. The accounts of Clinton's meeting with
the Crown Prince vary, as do accounts of Gore's
meeting with him. All sides, however, agree that the
meeting was a turning point in the Khobar
investigation-the catalyst for the Saudis to begin
sharing evidence with the F.B.I. Berger, who was
present, told me that Clinton brought up the Khobar
barracks case. The families needed closure, Berger
recalled Clinton saying: " 'Even if they can't always
get full justice, they can get the truth.' " Berger
went on, "He talked about how important it was to the
U.S.-Saudi relationship, and that if Americans didn't
believe the Saudis were helping the United States in
the investigation then the American public would not
support the U.S. defending Saudi Arabia." Berger also
said that Clinton repeated his assurances that the
United States would not take military action against
Iran without consulting the Saudis.
Two others familiar with the conversation said that
Crown Prince Abdullah and Bandar, who was also at the
meeting, had a very different interpretation of what
was said. Clinton, they said, mentioned Khobar only
briefly. "It was along the line of 'Would you be kind
enough to continue coöperation?' " one source said.
Mostly, they remembered the Crown Prince consoling
Clinton about his legal troubles. At one point, the
Crown Prince, who was wearing a black robe, said to
Clinton, "All those who attack you and are making such
a big issue out of this"-the Lewinsky affair-"should
be like the lint on my robes. One should just throw
them off." The Crown Prince shook his robe. Clinton,
by many accounts, was almost crying. "He also told
Clinton that he would talk to people on the Hill and
tell them they should respect the Presidency and not
wipe the floor with it." Clinton and the Crown Prince
then had a long conversation about the Middle East and
the internal situation in Iran-and the importance of
supporting moderate elements there. After Clinton
left, according to these sources, the Crown Prince was
puzzled. Bandar had warned him to expect some "very
important questions" about Khobar, but Clinton had not
raised them. "What's going on?" the Crown Prince asked
Bandar. Gore, who was supposed to press the Khobar
case the hardest, had mentioned it only briefly, in
reply to a question asked by the Crown Prince about
the status of Sayegh, who had appealed for political
asylum and, a year later, had still not been deported.
Gore confined his reply to the legal issue surrounding
Sayegh. (Sayegh was finally sent to Saudi Arabia in
October of 1999.)
The effect of this meeting, Bandar told Freeh, was to
persuade the Crown Prince that the case was no longer
of great importance to the United States, and that
prompted Freeh to take an extraordinary step: he
approached former President George Bush and asked him
to intervene with the Saudi royal family. When I asked
Freeh about this last week, he said, "I don't want to
get into the details of that," but others close to him
confirm it. Clinton, apparently, never knew that his
predecessor in the White House had become a special
emissary for the F.B.I. director.
The intercession worked; Bush has been regarded as
something of a savior in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf
War. After talking with the elder Bush, the Crown
Prince asked Bandar to send for Freeh. On September
29th, Freeh arrived at Bandar's McLean estate with
Dale Watson, the Bureau's anti-terrorism chief. "We
respect your laws and Sharia," Freeh said, according
to someone who has read the official notes from the
meeting. He also conceded that if he were in the
Mubahith, the Saudi equivalent of the F.B.I., he
probably would oppose working with the Bureau. Freeh
then asked if the Crown Prince would allow the F.B.I.
to interview the suspects in custody. The Crown Prince
proposed a compromise: the F.B.I. could write
questions and monitor the replies as a Saudi officer
posed them. "Combatting terrorism is a duty not only
called for by all religions, but it is a duty to the
human race," the Crown Prince was quoted as saying.
The Crown Prince, by all accounts, was impressed by
Freeh and persuaded by his forthrightness. He'd found
Freeh respectful of Saudi concerns in a way that, to
his mind, the White House and its foreign-policy
apparatus had not been. The F.B.I. had also promised
to provide forensic training to the Mubahith, which
the Saudis were eager to have. The Crown Prince told
Bandar to call Prince Nayef, the Saudi Interior
Minister, who was overseeing the investigation, and to
instruct him to give the F.B.I. full access to the
Saudi evidence and witnesses. Bandar told Freeh, but
suggested that the news be kept quiet. It would not
necessarily be an advantage if their neighbors in the
Middle East thought that they were coöperating. "If
anything leaks, we will know it will be from Louis
Freeh," the Crown Prince had said just before the
meeting in McLean.
V
On November 9, 1998, Freeh finally got what he had
been seeking for two and a half years. From behind a
one-way mirror, F.B.I. agents watched and listened as
Saudi law-enforcement officers posed the Bureau's two
hundred and twelve questions to eight suspects. The
suspects confirmed their involvement in the bombing
and described how the Iranians had ordered, supported,
and financed the attack. Khassab, the cell member who
had been turned over by the Syrians, claimed that he
had met directly with Ahmad Sherifi, the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard official who had selected the
Khobar barracks as a target, and that Sherifi always
announced that he was acting at the behest of
Ayatollah Khamenei. The Saudis also gave the F.B.I.
samples of all physical evidence and transcripts of
interviews with other cell members. Earlier, the
Saudis had shared highly confidential-and, to their
minds, vital-intelligence information collected in
Syria, which showed that the suspects had stopped at
the Iranian Embassy in Damascus to pick up Iranian
passports and that they had travelled through the
Syrian airport on their way to Iran and Lebanon for
training.
Soon after Freeh received these reports, he went to
Berger's West Wing office to tell him that they might
finally have the evidence necessary to bring
indictments. Freeh told Berger that he was looking
into whether the United States could take testimony in
Saudi Arabia for a grand jury in the States; it was a
novel legal concept, and the Saudis had not yet agreed
to it. Almost before Freeh could finish, Berger
demanded, "Who else knows about this?" Did the press
know? This was the last question that Freeh expected
from a national-security adviser. Not many people
knew, Freeh replied. The information was very closely
held. Berger also questioned some of the statements
linking the bombing to the Iranian government.
"That's just hearsay," Berger said.
"No, Sandy," Freeh replied. "It's testimony of a
co-conspirator in furtherance of a conspiracy."
Berger, Freeh later thought, was not a
national-security adviser; he was a public-relations
hack, interested in how something would play in the
press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded
that the Administration did not really want to resolve
the Khobar bombing. When I asked Berger about this, he
seemed baffled by Freeh's interpretation. He told me
that he'd asked Freeh who else knew because "I didn't
want to see this in the Washington Post before I had a
chance to talk to the President about it. I thought it
was a fair question." As national-security adviser,
Berger said, he had a responsibility to give the
President breathing room to make decisions. Berger
also felt that the F.B.I. had a tendency to leak. Then
he pointed out that in the course of the investigation
a low-level F.B.I. employee inadvertently sent a
classified F.B.I. report on Khobar, which included
transcripts of some interviews, to hundreds of people
in the government. As for characterizing the
statements made by suspects as "hearsay," Berger said
that, for the most part, the men in custody were
talking about meetings in which they were not
participants.
Berger, a graduate of Harvard Law School who
specialized in international law, recalled, "I asked
Louis whether what he had was hearsay. 'Can you use it
in a courtroom?' . . . I wanted to know how we could
use it"-to obtain indictments. Berger said he had had
no idea that Freeh was upset when he left. He had
ended the meeting by telling Freeh to let him know if
there was anything else he could do to help. "What did
we know about Khobar?" Berger later asked me. "We know
it was done by the Saudi Hezbollah. We know that they
were trained in Iran by Iranians. We know there was
Iranian involvement. What has yet to be established is
how substantial the Iranian involvement was"-in other
words, whether it had been promoted and sanctioned by
the Iranian government.
Not long after Freeh's meeting with Berger, Bandar and
Massoud went to see Berger to discuss the information
that the Saudis had shared with Freeh. "Why are you
giving us all this stuff?" Berger asked the Saudis.
"Because you were bugging the hell out of us for it,"
Bandar replied. Bandar left the meeting shaking his
head, believing that Berger was upset because the
Administration could not ignore hard evidence tying
the bombing to Iran. Bandar and Massoud later
approached Freeh, and one of them said, "What the hell
is going on? We went to bat for you and then Berger
asks, 'Why are you telling us this now?' "
"Guess what," Freeh replied, in this account. "I got
the same reaction."
Berger said that he had been angry because the Saudis
had knowingly withheld the most conclusive
evidence-which they'd had within months of the
bombing. He was also weary of Bandar's maneuverings.
"They had engaged in a kind of game for two years of
trying to make a separate peace with Iran and told us,
'We will only give you this information if you promise
not to do anything with it or promise to obliterate
Iran from the face of the earth,' " Berger told me.
At about the same time, Freeh wrote a confidential
memo summarizing the case. Since this was a
national-security case with potentially significant
foreign-policy implications, any decision to pursue
criminal charges would probably be made by the
President. Freeh later told someone who had worked
closely with him that he had written the memo because
he was skeptical that the Administration would take
any action. "He told me he had done this because he
knew that one day this could come back to haunt him
and he felt he needed to be covered," this person told
me recently. "He wanted to have something in the
system explaining his views. So it's there."
Bandar and Massoud concluded that the relationship
between the Administration and Freeh had completely
deteriorated. Whenever Freeh's name came up, they
noticed that Berger's body language signalled
discomfort. In Bandar's view, Freeh's disillusionment
made him dangerous-someone who would act on what he
thought was right regardless of the consequences.
"Freeh is a lovely human being," Bandar told one
associate. "But he is much more sophisticated and
deadly than benign."
In the summer of 1999, President Clinton sent a
message to President Khatami through a senior Omani
official asking Khatami for help in the Khobar
investigation. The official had been instructed to
deliver it only when he was alone with the Iranian
President. According to one person who saw the message
and read part of it to me, Clinton made two main
points: first, that the United States had solid
evidence of Iranian involvement in the bombing and,
second, that he wanted Khatami to coöperate with Saudi
investigators. In return, Clinton said, the United
States would be willing to explore ways that the two
countries could work together. As it happened, Khatami
was not alone when he received the letter. He replied
through an emissary that the Iranians did not know
what Clinton was talking about.
Someone in Iran leaked Clinton's letter to journalists
in the Middle East, and they in turn emphasized Iran's
rejection of it. The Saudis were angry that they
hadn't been told about the letter and wondered what
else the United States might be up to. Bandar asked
Berger why Freeh, at least, hadn't been informed.
Bandar later told an associate that Berger had said
Freeh had a tin ear for politics-that he didn't know a
thing about foreign affairs and could lead the United
States into war.
"That's bullshit," Berger said when I repeated this to
him. "I would never say anything disparaging like that
about a colleague to Bandar. He would dine out on that
for a month." He added that he found it ironic that
the Saudis were indignant that they had not been told
the United States was sending a letter to the Iranians
when the Saudis had been making overtures to the
Iranians for two years. "What's the Saudi equivalent
of chutzpah?"
That fall, the Administration publicly acknowledged
for the first time that Iranian officials were under
investigation. "We have information about the
involvement of some Iranian officials in the Khobar
attack," Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern
Affairs Martin Indyk said in little-noticed testimony
at his Senate confirmation hearings to be United
States Ambassador to Israel. "We have not yet reached
the conclusion that the Iranian government was
involved or responsible for the attack."
VI
Last October, a terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole,
stationed near Yemen, killed seventeen American
sailors. Once more, Freeh dispatched F.B.I. agents and
went to the scene himself. (He also stopped in Saudi
Arabia, landing late at night and meeting into the
morning with Saudi officials to discuss the Khobar
investigation.) When he returned, Freeh spoke briefly
to Clinton; it was the first time they had spoken in
four years.
By then, the Saudis had agreed that they would allow
some suspects to testify if the United States brought
indictments against Iranian officials. Freeh, though,
had already decided to wait for a change in
Administrations. Earlier this year, after briefing
President Bush on the status of the investigation-as
well as Secretary of State Colin Powell, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney
General John Ashcroft-Freeh asked for a new federal
prosecutor to be assigned to the case, presumably to
present the case to the grand jury if a decision is
made to go forward with indictments. One senior Bush
Administration official who will be involved in the
decision-which bureau officials hope will be resolved
before the end of June, when Freeh leaves-has hinted
that the new Administration will probably not oppose
the indictments. In the interim, he said, the
Administration had put its Iran policy on hold because
it wanted to avoid the appearance of inconsistency in
reaching out to Iran while simultaneously indicting
Iranian officials.
With Freeh set to leave his post in early summer, it
is easy to imagine that indictments in the Khobar
barracks case would mark a sort of end to his battles
with the Clinton Administration as well as a
vindication of his doggedness. If the Bush
Administration decides not to act, Freeh nevertheless
believes that he will finally be able to tell the
families of the dead Americans what happened that June
nearly five years ago. The Clinton-era scandals and
the public embarrassments of the Bureau certainly
occupied much of his time, but nothing absorbed him as
much-as deeply and as personally-as the Khobar
barracks bombing.
In one of our last interviews, Freeh told me that he
had been asked by the captain of the U.S.S. Cole to
address the surviving sailors when he was in Yemen:
"So I spoke to them, and you get up in front of them
and you realize they are all twenty, nineteen,
eighteen years of age. And I gave them our prayers and
condolences. I told them that this tragedy had just
occurred, but, as long as it took, somebody in the
F.B.I. would be working on this case, diligently and
persistently, until we found the people responsible
and were able to identify them."
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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