Louis Freeh and the War on Terror

I had written earlier here about Bill Clinton's bungling the efforts of the FBI to investigate terrorism. It came to my attention that New Yorker covered this quite nicely back in 2001:

Louis Freeh's Last Case
On June 25, 1996, shortly before 10 p.m., three sentries posted on a rooftop at Khobar Towers, a high-rise compound that housed the two thousand American military personnel assigned to the King Abdul Aziz Airbase, in Saudi Arabia, noticed a tanker truck pull up to a perimeter fence. The area had been declared a likely target for a terrorist attack, and when the sentries saw two men jump out of the truck into a car and speed away they recognized the possibility of a bomb. They desperately tried to evacuate the building, pounding on the doors of sleeping airmen; four minutes later, the truck exploded, shearing off the face of Building 131. The explosion was so powerful that it left a crater eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep; the blast could be heard in Bahrain, some twenty miles away. Nineteen men were killed and about five hundred were injured. Greater casualties were avoided only because the bombers had put water in the tanker, forcing the blast downward.

Louis Freeh, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was visiting relatives in New Jersey when he was told about the bombing, and he immediately dispatched a hundred and twenty-five agents and employees to Saudi Arabia. (Though the Saudis had primary legal authority, the F.B.I. is charged with investigating the deaths of Americans overseas.) Shortly after returning to Washington, Freeh and Robert (Bear) Bryant, then his national-security deputy, boarded an Air Force jet for the seventeen-hour flight to Saudi Arabia. It was unusual for F.B.I. directors to visit crime scenes, but Freeh had become a familiar sight to agents working on big cases.

And some more:

President Clinton had publicly promised to punish those involved, vowing "to make sure those responsible are brought to justice." Almost from the start, however, the F.B.I. team in Saudi Arabia complained about a lack of access to key Saudi evidence. In response, Freeh pushed the National Security Council and the State Department to impress upon the Saudis the importance of the investigation. Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger, who became the Clinton Administration's national-security adviser, told me that Clinton wrote to King Fahd and met with Fahd's half brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, in New York, personally urging them to co�perate. The Secretaries of Defense and State, Berger added, made personal appeals to the Saudi hierarchy.

Over the next few months, Freeh travelled twice more to Saudi Arabia. "Louis would go over there and try to negotiate for them to show us the evidence," Esposito said. "And then, at the highest levels, they would agree to it. And then . . . it wouldn't happen, so Louis would have to make another trip." But Freeh also heard from his Saudi counterparts that there had been little followup to the Administration's statements; as a result, a mixed signal was being sent about the seriousness of United States resolve. Freeh came to believe that the Clinton Administration feared jeopardizing its strategic relationships in the Middle East by pressing too hard; in fact, by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he believed that he had developed enough evidence to seek indictments against the masterminds behind the attack, not just the front-line suspects, he decided to wait for a new Administration. The matter is unusually sensitive, because any indictments are likely to name Iranian government officials, especially those with ties to Iranian intelligence, commonly believed to be the source of terrorist activities.

It's a fairly long article but one worth reading for insight into Clinton's "legacy" and how his inactivity only strengthened the Iranian and Saudi support of terror.