Deal With Saudi Bomb Suspect Falls Apart

The letter delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa last April was written by hand in Arabic. Its author, a 28-year-old Saudi dissident, offered an intriguing deal: In exchange for his protection from the Saudi and Iranian governments, he would provide inside information about the 1994 Khobar bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. airmen and injured another 384.

Hani al-Sayegh, who had been arrested on March 18 after a Saudi tip that a long-sought suspect in the attack had fled to Canada, wrote that he wanted “refugee status in the United States and a name change,” and that if “you bring my family to America, I’ll help you.”

FBI agents, whose backbreaking 10-month investigation of the bombing had been repeatedly frustrated by Saudi stonewalling, thought they finally had the break they needed. The Justice Department agreed to meet many of his terms, including supporting his wife and two infant sons in the United States at taxpayer expense, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

Yet six months later, the deal between al-Sayegh and the FBI has fallen apart. On Friday, a U.S. judge is scheduled to dismiss the only charges now pending against him: a separate, lesser conspiracy with the Iranians to buy guns that might be used against U.S. interests.

And the core question--whether al-Sayegh signaled the bomber and then drove the white Toyota escape vehicle from the Khobar apartment complex in Dhahran--is today more disputed than when he was nabbed in a Canadian deli.

“We have come to no final conclusion about Hani al-Sayegh,” a senior Clinton administration official said. “A lot of us remember the initial conclusions after the [1988] Pan Am 103 bombing, when strong evidence pointed at Palestinian radicals as the perpetrators and Syria and Iran as the sponsors, but later evidence proved that Libyan intelligence agents carried it out.”

Several Terror Cases Remain in Legal Limbo

The unraveling of the much-heralded case illustrates how daunting the task is for American police and prosecutors seeking the full truth behind labyrinthine terrorist conspiracies.

The legal saga of al-Sayegh, a former grocery clerk and religious student, underscores why many of the deadliest terrorist attacks against Americans over the last 15 years have never been prosecuted. Among the most notorious still in legal limbo are the 1983 Marine bombing in Beirut, the 1983 American Embassy bombings in Lebanon and Kuwait, and many hostage seizures.

In al-Sayegh, the U.S. thought it had either a perpetrator, or someone with intimate knowledge of the attack. In return for his cooperation, the U.S. team not only agreed to bring his family to the United States but also held out the possibility that al-Sayegh could have conjugal visits while he served a shortened--and still negotiable--prison term for his part in the lesser conspiracy.

Al-Sayegh signed the deal and, on June 17, was deported to Washington. But the deal was deeply flawed from several angles--beginning with al-Sayegh’s understanding of it.

When terms of his plea agreement were fully explained to him by his new American lawyer, he was so distraught that he collapsed. The deal, he realized for the first time, was silent on what would become of him after he got out of prison--when he would still be liable for deportation to Saudi Arabia.

This point, combined with what his defense team considered major legal mistakes by his American interrogators in Ottawa, allowed him to back out of the plea agreement. A lawyer for al-Sayegh was not present throughout the negotiations, nor was he given a copy of the agreement in either English or Arabic until after he arrived in Washington.

The FBI refuses to discuss why the case is being dismissed, but the mistakes have created a furor among U.S. counter-terrorism officials outside the FBI.

Suspect Denies Any Role in Blast

The account of al-Sayegh’s interrogation, based on interviews with legal sources, investigators, officials and other principal players in Ottawa and Washington, begins in the chapel of Ottawa’s Carleton Correctional Facility. Behind drawn blinds, Justice Department prosecutor Eric Dubelier and two senior FBI counter-terrorism experts sat down for the first time with al-Sayegh.

The Saudi Shi’ite Muslim was profoundly nervous. After more than a decade in and out of Iran, where he had studied religion, al-Sayegh viewed Americans as the main prop supporting his country’s Sunni Muslim government, which had imprisoned a cousin, harassed his family and repeatedly interrogated him and an older brother about dissident activities.

But considering his options, al-Sayegh agreed to talk--through six sessions, one lasting 11 hours and ending shortly before dawn.

Throughout, al-Sayegh denied any role in or knowledge of the Khobar bombing. He wasn’t even in Saudi Arabia at the time, he claimed. He was in Iran, where he had spent long periods as a religious student since 1984.

Then why, the FBI team repeatedly pressed him, did at least four Saudis who had confessed to knowledge of the Khobar bombing--and who were held in separate isolation cells in a Saudi jail--each name al-Sayegh and describe his specific role?

Al-Sayegh admitted knowing many of the Shi’ites suspected of involvement in the attack, including alleged bomber Ahmed Mughassil. Although his initial letter to the U.S. Embassy stipulated that he did not want to testify against any one person, al-Sayegh was almost chatty once he started talking about various individuals.

“The ground rules were that he did not talk about Khobar, yet the minute they started talking, he sang like a bird,” said a source familiar with the interrogations.

Covering a decade of dissident activities and trips to Iran, al-Sayegh offered hours of information about peers who had been in Iran under the auspices of militant clerics, Saudi Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He admitted to encounters with others in Iran-sponsored camps in Lebanon or among Saudi dissidents living in Syria.

But the allegations about his involvement in Khobar were false, he said. Why, if he had been at Khobar, would he have gone through the United States to Canada? Why would he have used his real name?

He even volunteered to take a lie-detector test, an offer eventually incorporated into the plea agreement as a prerequisite for the benefits the United States promised.

And in a moment of frustrated exhaustion, he even offered to confess to Khobar. “Give me a piece of paper and I’ll sign it. Then you can fill out whatever you want it to say,” he told the FBI team, according to sources familiar with the interrogation. The FBI declined the offer.

Al-Sayegh told the FBI that he thought he knew who was behind the attack--his former mentors in Iran. He more than willingly spilled his guts about the direct support of specific Iranian clerics and military officials, such as Revolutionary Guard Brig. Gen. Ahmad Sherifi, for Saudi dissidents.

Sherifi once ordered him to make an hourlong reconnaissance video of U.S.-made AWACS surveillance aircraft from a rooftop near a Saudi air base, he said.

In addition, Sherifi ordered him in 1995 to find weapons in Jizan, along the Yemen border, for use in anti-Saudi activities, he said. Iran, however, did not wire him any funds to pay for the arms, and as far as he knew the small weapons never found their way to anti-Saudi dissidents.

But could those weapons, the FBI pressed, possibly also be used against Americans in Saudi Arabia?

Suspect’s Guilt Is Matter of Debate

Al-Sayegh said he knew of no plan to go after Americans, although he thought it was a possibility if the United States got in the way.

This admission formed the basis of the weapons charges the FBI used against al-Sayegh to win his plea agreement.

“The FBI tried desperately to come up with something, but they never had anything on this guy,” said a source familiar with the negotiations. “Both sides wanted a deal so he wouldn’t be deported to Saudi Arabia, but they couldn’t make it on Khobar because he said he wasn’t there. So suddenly every little half-assed episode took on great importance.”

Although senior FBI officials remain adamant in their belief that al-Sayegh was involved in the Khobar bombing, other U.S. officials concede that there are disagreements about the probability of his guilt.

Evidence is so far largely circumstantial and based on confessions obtained by Saudi officials who are frequently criticized by human rights groups for torturing their prisoners.

“The case has many weaknesses. Much of the evidence is indirect,” a law enforcement official conceded.

Others who have spent prolonged periods of time with al-Sayegh say he does not fit the profile of a terrorist leader.

“He’s not a foot soldier or a spear carrier. He’d be no more than a file clerk in anyone’s organization,” said a source who has had frequent dealings with him. “He’s asthmatic. He’s so nervous he’d mishandle any operation as sensitive as Khobar.”

He was so nervous during his first meeting with the FBI team that he had a chronic asthma attack, and the session was almost canceled.

Others describe al-Sayegh as indecisive, a drifter who avoided hard work at all costs. For years, Iran provided a stipend while he studied. In Canada he lived on welfare while waiting for refugee status, although he worked illegally a few hours a week at the Queen Mary confectionary shop to make money that he often spent on video games, Canadian sources said.

He went to mandatory English classes but learned little. Otherwise, he spent most of his time indoors because he hated the cold weather.

“He failed at everything he has ever tried to do in terms of making a living. He survived off others’ largess,” said a Canadian source who knew him well.

After al-Sayegh disavowed the plea agreement, U.S. officials thought for a brief moment that they might be able to prosecute him. The Saudis, under U.S. pressure, briefly held out the possibility that they would allow the prosecution and allow defense teams to fly to the kingdom to take depositions from detained suspects.

But the Saudis never followed through, and the last chance of developing the only independent U.S. lead in the Khobar bombing disappeared.

Case closed? Hardly. Al-Sayegh’s story, which is part riddle, is also part poker game. And it may only be beginning.

Dropping Charges May Be U.S. Ploy

The U.S. may actually be dismissing the secondary charges as a ploy to up the ante in a three-sided game with al-Sayegh and Saudi Arabia. Once set free by the U.S. courts, al-Sayegh will face deportation to his native country. U.S. investigators appear to hope that his fear of Saudi justice may be so great that he will decide after all to admit his role in the Khobar bombing and take his chances with U.S authorities.

At the same time, the United States can dangle over Saudi Arabia the possibility of freeing al-Sayegh and deporting him to a third country instead of the kingdom. To prevent him from going free, the Saudis will have to provide oft-promised but undelivered evidence against al-Sayegh and other potential suspects.

But that same evidence could also then be used by Washington to prosecute al-Sayegh and finally get to the bottom of the Khobar bombing. That presupposes two key facts: that Al-Sayegh, who wants total immunity to reopen talks started in Canada, really has direct knowledge of the blast, and that the Saudis have evidence against al-Sayegh that would stand up in a U.S. court, and will agree to provide it.