Famously free with its cash, Saudi Arabia is notoriously stingy with hard facts about its internal affairs. And no subject is as delicate as opposition to the ruling family and its protector, the United States. No U.S. ally shares such an intimate strategic interest with Washington while divulging so little about itself. ““In Saudi, information is the coin of the kingdom, and each piece is guarded jealously,’’ says a Western diplomat who spent years in Riyadh. This week two separate congressional committees will question whether U.S. deference to Saudi sensibilities contributed to the Dhahran tragedy. One committee chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter, has called for Defense Secretary William Perry’s resignation. Kept in the dark, U.S. officials will argue that they did their best.
Outside the kingdom, Saudi spooks at times have been all too willing to advance Washington’s agenda. In 1985 Saudi agents reportedly contracted out a plan by CIA chief William Casey to assassinate radical Shiite cleric Mohammad Fadlallah. The sheik survived a car bombing, but 80 of his neighbors died. The White House also tapped the Saudis for funds when Congress prohibited aid to the Nicaraguan contras. And Saudi cash was critical to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union. Through the cold-war period the key figure was Kamal Adham, who oversaw Saudi covert activities and intelligence gathering. But by the mid-’80s, the relationship had begun to fray. One cause was the BCCI scandal; Adham was on the board of the bank’s Washington branch. Fighting Islamic radicals was delicate for the fundamentalist regime. And the Saudis tired of seeing their names in print. ““We don’t like the fact that Americans tell everything to the media,’’ one Saudi familiar with intelligence matters said last week. ““Here no one tells anyone anything.''
The Dhahran attack may well have been supported from abroad. U.S. and Saudi investigators suspect a cell of 20 or 30 extremists based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. They say that the group may have smuggled explosives across the border with Jordan at about the same time another shipment containing 38 kilograms of plastic explosives was intercepted. NEWSWEEK has learned that suspects in that case revealed that a second vehicle came in undetected.
But ““the Saudis get lockjaw’’ when it comes to the domestic end of the investigation, says a senior Pentagon intelligence officer. And the condition is chronic. Partly that is due to competition among rival agencies and even individual princes within the kingdom; information is reported upward, but rarely is shared and compared. The more than 60 FBI agents working on the bombing must cooperate with the Saudi secret police, who are unused to dealing with foreigners. And the CIA has recruited few assets of its own. Most Saudis don’t need money, and a reluctant CIA fears damaging the relationship. ““The risk of having something go wrong is not worth it,’’ says one Pentagon source. It can be frustrating. During the air war against Baghdad, U.S. intelligence officers were denied access to Iraqi defectors. They spent days trying to quash a rumor, picked up by a Saudi prince’s private spy network, that Saddam Hussein had stashed warplanes in neighboring Yemen. And the Saudis executed suspects in the November bombing of U.S. troops without letting the FBI question them. They didn’t share tips on suspects caught spying on the Khobar Towers complex. Clearly they will conduct the new investigation their own way. ““Above all, it must be the Saudis alone who catch the bombers,’’ said one Saudi agent. ““Otherwise it will be very difficult for us internally.’’ Washington may not like it, but there is little it can do to change that view.
