COBALT BOMB FIRST STRIKE FULL

Once Secretary Perry arrived, toured the bomb site, and met with the Air Force commanders on the scene, the next step was to find a new location to operate from, with better security. The Khobar Towers were in the middle of an urban area. Minister of Defense and Aviation Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz (Bandar’s father) suggested a base south of Riyadh named after him and isolated deep in the desert. The leader of the Saudi Shia collaborators, Ahmed Mughassil, was captured by the Saudis in Beirut in 2015. The Iranians role has rightly gotten the most attention but Lebanese Hezbollah was the key to the bombing. It provided the bomb maker who put the explosives together in the truck.

COBALT BOMB FIRST STRIKE FULL

When I visited the mosque in 1988 it was full of widows and orphans of Guards killed in the Iran-Iraq war. In the 1990s it was a stronghold of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Damascus. It is a very holy site for Shia pilgrims to visit. The mosque is the tomb of Zaynab, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and his nephew Ali. The plot was hatched two years earlier at the Sayyihdah Zaynab Mosque in Damascus, Syria, by three parties: Iranian intelligence, Lebanese Hezbollah, and a collection of Saudi Shia terrorist groups under various names including Hezbollah in the Hejaz.

The Saudis knew of the existence of a Iranian-backed Saudi Shia terrorist organization which had been smuggling explosives into the Dhahran area. We learned later that the Saudis had considerable information on the bombers that they were not sharing. Bandar was careful not to state unequivocally that Iran was behind the attack but he certainly pointed in that direction.īy David Menashri, Eliyahu Kanovsky, Michael Eisenstadt, and Patrick Clawson 1998 Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz was an old friend we had worked closely together after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the Gulf War in 1991. I meet with the Saudi ambassador to the United States who had been home in Riyadh when the attack occurred and rushed to Dhahran immediately. In our first meeting she was still bleeding a little. She was a lieutenant who had been wounded in the attack. Photo provided by the author.Īs the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Near East and South Asia I was the most senior civilian Defense Department official in Saudi Arabia. The Air Force assigned to me a control officer as usual.

The nearby Saudi community was also decimated. An enormous crater marked where the bomb had exploded.

The bomb scene was horrific. The external walls of the barracks had been blown out so you could see the devastation within. My luggage was in the hold, it left without me. En route I was told that I should stay in Dhahran when Christopher departed and prepare for a visit by Perry in a week or so. The next morning we flew directly to Dhahran Airfield to see the site and meet with the survivors. I was in Jerusalem that evening traveling with Secretary of State Warren Christopher as the representative of the Secretary of Defense William Perry. Its legacy still haunts Washington’s relations with Iran. The terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers was the bloodiest attack on America between the Beirut Marine barracks disaster in 1983 and September 11, 2001. Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology

Cobalt bomb first strike