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By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior CorrespondentDiplomatic cables show bombings in the Saudi kingdom in 2001 left U.S. citizens more anxious than reported.
With the world still reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, few people paid any attention to a suicide bombing less than a month later that killed an American oil worker in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.
Few, that is, except other Americans living in the kingdom.
Erroneous reports of a second bombing, "coupled with the Al Khobar incident and the Afghan bombing campaign, have pushed some American citizens into near hysteria," the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh cabled the State Department in mid October 2001.
"Many are hunkering down in their homes," the embassy said. "The streets of Al Khobar are denuded of Westerners. One observer noted the total lack of shopping buses that carry wives to the supermarket on a normal morning."
The cables were among a flurry of dispatches to the State Department, U.S. Central Command in Tampa and other American embassies after the Oct. 6 bombing death of Michael Martin - an event that "decidedly unnerved" the 13,000 Americans living in eastern Saudi Arabia. The documents, requested more than a year ago, were recently obtained by the St. Petersburg Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The cables suggest a far greater level of post-9/11 fear among Americans in the kingdom than has been publicly acknowledged. They also paint a rosier picture of Saudi cooperation after Sept. 11 than that portrayed by critics of the secretive Saudi regime.
Coincidentally, the documents arrived at a time when the Bush administration is refusing to release 28 pages of a congressional report on Sept. 11 that purportedly details Saudi Arabia's involvement with Islamic terrorist groups.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, complained last week that the report "overlooked or intentionally ignored" Saudi efforts against terrorism, including the arrest of more than 500 suspects. The classified section of the report is said to detail how some of the hijackers received money and other help from Saudi individuals with government ties.
But in one of the cables obtained by the Times, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh told Washington in late 2001 that the Saudi government had offered "full cooperation" in the war on terror.
Among other things, the embassy said, the Saudis had cut diplomatic ties with the Taliban; allowed overflights of U.S. warplanes to Afghanistan; cooperated with the U.S. law enforcement investigation of the hijackings; and instructed Saudi banks to freeze accounts used by terrorist groups.
The Saudi government "does not politically or financially support international terrorist organizations or activities," one dispatch said.
However, the embassy noted, "there continue to be allegations" that terrorist groups collected money from private Saudi citizens. And it was "not clear" whether the Saudi government enforced its own rules requiring anyone who solicited for "domestic or international causes" to first get government approval.
The Times received the cables in response to a request for State Department records on two attacks against Americans in Khobar in 2001. A letter bomb on May 3 maimed Gary Hatch, a Florida chiropractor who had been working at a local hospital.
The second attack, on Oct. 6, killed Michael Martin of Oklahoma, an employee of oil services giant Halliburton, and injured another American as they came out of a store popular with Westerners.
The bombings were among a string of attacks since 2000 that have killed or injured several Americans and Britons working in the kingdom. The U.S., British and Saudi governments have said little publicly about the bombings, and the Saudis have insisted that most stemmed from a turf war among Western bootleggers and were not the work of anti-Western Islamic extremists.
But the documents obtained by the Times show that U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia detected a "radical shift" in local attitudes toward Americans after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict erupted in late 2000.
U.S. troops in Dhahran went on the highest state of alert because of an "upsurge in threats" from organized groups like al-Qaida, the embassy said. Moreover, "the potential for random acts of violence has increased enormously."
The rising tensions also were felt by Americans in Khobar and Dhahran, about 40 percent of whom were connected with the huge oil company Saudi Aramco.
"Several threatening phone calls were reported," the embassy said. "The caller was usually a young male speaking Arab-accented English. Typically, the caller threatened death to Americans, often referencing Osama bin Laden."
Other incidents included rock throwings and vandalism to cars. One couple reported that young Saudi men had made obscene gestures at them. An American woman said a group of Saudi youths spat at her outside a supermarket.
Not all the incidents were the work of hooligans. The embassy cables show that the muttawan, or religious police, were aggressively enforcing the rigid Wahhabi form of Islam.
In Dhahran, a muttawa struck and bruised a U.S. consular officer because his wife had entered a mall with her hair uncovered. Other Western women were ordered out of a mall for not being swathed head to toe in black. Some women were afraid to leave their compounds because of these "zealots," the embassy said.
In addition, expatriates were shocked when the muttawan publicly flogged several Saudi men in a mall. "With the chance of witnessing such gruesome and bloody acts the malls have become yet another place of heightened anxiety and fear, especially if accompanied by children," the embassy reported.
But fear turned to terror on Oct. 6, 2001, when Martin was killed by a suicide bomber. Americans who had lived in Saudi Arabia for decades "have been shocked out of complacency," by that attack and the September hijackings, the U.S. Embassy reported to Washington.
Residents of the Aramco compound expressed a "lack of confidence" in the company's ability to protect them. Spouses and dependents "are beginning to leave the eastern province in increasing numbers," while others "are staying home in fear, refusing to go out of doors."
Some American companies, including Halliburton, were liberal in letting employees use annual leave to temporarily return to the United States. General Electric removed its "well-known logo from local offices, lest it become a target."
Two days after Martin's death, the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran received "an onslaught" of calls about a rumored second explosion. It caused so much anxiety that Saudi Aramco schools were immediately closed and the wives of three Aramco employees left the kingdom that night.
The noise turned out to be a sonic boom. Nonetheless, 700 Americans met with consular officials on Oct. 15. "The very large number of attendees reflected the anxiety many Americans in the eastern province currently feel," the embassy said.
Some in the crowd angrily wondered why the embassy had not ordered evacuations. Officials replied that "U.S. citizens must decide for themselves what their comfort level is in living with the current state of regional tension."
In another cable, the embassy told Washington that two U.S. oil companies negotiating on a $25-billion Saudi gas deal had "no intention" of pulling out of the kingdom, even though they had delayed the arrival of dependents.
Executives of the companies "confirmed Saudi Aramco's approach of "business as usual' in the wake of Sept. 11," the dispatch said.
The hijackings and Martin's death prompted some Americans to permanently leave the kingdom, but not in huge numbers. Forsaking large, tax-free salaries and generally comfortable living conditions "for a U.S. domestic economy on the downturn may prove to be a strong disincentive for some employees to leave," the embassy said.
Those who stayed, though, remained concerned about their safety. According to the cables obtained by the Times, the embassy praised Saudi efforts to protect U.S. government personnel and interests in response to terrorist threats in 2001.
But Ambassador Robert Jordan was far more critical in May after three bombings in Riyadh killed 35, including nine Americans. Jordan said the Saudis had failed to act on U.S. requests to increase security around compounds in the capital.
In response to the Times' request for records about the earlier bombings, the State Department released 12 documents. Some material was excised from two of those, and five more documents were withheld altogether "in the interest of national defense or foreign relations," the department said.
- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com