FBI Director Returns to Saudi Arabia for Talks

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has returned to Saudi Arabia to try to overcome a culture clash that appears to be inhibiting the investigation of the June 25 terrorist bombing that killed 19 American servicemen, officials said Friday.

A brief FBI announcement said that Freeh is in Jidda for talks with senior Saudi officials. The bureau said the trip, the second by the director in a little more than a week, “shows the importance of the investigation to the United States.”

Freeh left Washington secretly Thursday night. Officials said he probably will remain in Saudi Arabia at least through the weekend, going to Riyadh, the capital, after his talks in Jidda, the country’s major Red Sea port and a commercial center.

Officials said Freeh hopes to reach an agreement on rules covering the joint U.S.-Saudi investigation into the bombing at a high-rise complex housing U.S. Air Force personnel. So far, the deep cultural differences between the world’s most powerful democracy and the secretive Arab monarchy have made cooperation difficult.

Even before Freeh’s latest trip, FBI officials have complained privately that Saudi investigative techniques, which sometimes involve torture or other forms of duress, might taint the case so that it could never be tried in U.S. courts.

The Saudis have said that American investigators are too concerned with legal details. The Saudis also are known to have complained that many of the more than 70 FBI agents sent to help with the inquiry are women. In Saudi Arabia, women infrequently work outside the home and are not even allowed to drive automobiles.

A few days after the truck-bomb attack, King Fahd promised Defense Secretary William J. Perry that Saudi authorities would cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation.

ABC-TV, which first reported Freeh’s latest trip, said American and Saudi investigators disagree over which Middle East country is most likely to have aided the terrorists. The United States believes that Iran should be a primary suspect; the Saudis believe that Syria may have been involved, the ABC report said.

Perry has said that if a third country is found to have been involved in the bombing, the United States would take “appropriate” action. If Syria is implicated in the attack, it would put a major strain on U.S. diplomacy, which is trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Syria.

On the other hand, indications of Iranian involvement would buttress Washington’s long-standing effort to isolate the Tehran regime.

U.S. officials have complained that the Saudis refused to allow FBI investigators to question four suspects arrested in the November car bombing of a U.S. facility in Riyadh that killed five American servicemen. The suspects were beheaded May 31.

Although State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns has said there is no question that the four were guilty, their speedy execution underlined the differences between the American and Saudi approaches to criminal justice.

Also Friday, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. military has begun an aggressive campaign to prevent future terrorist attacks against American personnel in Saudi Arabia.

“You can’t sit here and wait to be attacked,” Air Force Gen. Howell Estes III, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters. “You’ve got to get aggressive and try to stop it.”

Estes declined to provide details. But other officials said the measures include intense efforts to infiltrate terrorist groups, increased border patrols to prevent terrorists based in other countries from reaching the kingdom and creation of new anti-terrorism quick-reaction teams.