The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [120]
Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney’s well-known pledge that they would leave. Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq. By 1992, however, and certainly by 1993, there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission. But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn’t seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.
THE WEEK FOLLOWING bin Laden’s insulting letter to the king, Prince Naif announced the execution of Abdullah al-Hudhaif. Hudhaif, an Arab Afghan, was not under a death sentence; he had been given twenty years for spraying acid in the face of a security officer who was reputed to have been a torturer. The Saudis were now being advised by the former Egyptian minister of the interior, who had led a brutal crackdown on dissidents in his own country. There was a wide-spread feeling in the Kingdom that the stakes had been raised, and that this summary execution was a message to bin Laden and his followers. Hudhaif’s Arab Afghan comrades, for their part, were calling for revenge against the regime.
In downtown Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Telateen Street, across from the Steak House restaurant, there was a communications center for the Saudi National Guard. The mission of the guard was to protect the royal family and enforce stability. Because those goals were also important to the United States, there was an agreement between the two countries that the U.S. Army, along with the Vinnell Corporation, an American defense contractor, would train the guard in the monitoring and surveillance of Saudi citizens.
Shortly before noon on November 13, 1995, Colonel Albert M. Bleakley, an engineer who had lived for three years in the Kingdom, walked out of the center to his truck, parked on the street outside. Suddenly a hot blast blew him backward several feet. When he was able to stand, he could see a line of cars burning, including the demolished remnants of his Chevrolet Yukon. “Why would my car blow up?” he wondered. “There are no bombs here.”
The assassins had parked a van containing a hundred pounds of Semtex explosive outside the three-story building, which was now shattered and burning. Bleakley staggered into the ruin. He was bleeding from the neck and his ears were ringing from the deafening blast. Three dead men lay in the snack bar, crushed by a concrete wall. Four others were killed and sixty people injured. Five of the dead were Americans.
The Saudi government reacted by rounding up Arab Afghans and torturing confessions out of four men. Three of the four suspects had fought in Afghanistan, and one had also fought in Bosnia. The purported leader of the group, Muslih al-Shamrani, had trained at al-Qaeda’s Farouk camp in Afghanistan. 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. Then they were taken to a public square and beheaded.
Although bin Laden never publicly admitted authorizing the attack or training the men who carried it out, he called them “heroes” and suggested they were responding to