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Us demands saudis increase security { May 15 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56204-2003May14.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56204-2003May14.html
U.S. Asked Saudis to Increase Security
Kingdom Failed to Act Quickly in Days Before Bombings, Envoy Says
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 15, 2003; Page A01
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 14 -- The United States urgently asked Saudi Arabia to bolster security at residential compounds inhabited by Westerners just days before this week's terrorist attacks in which eight Americans died, but the Saudi government failed to act, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia said today.
Saudi officials quickly denied the charge.
In television interviews on U.S. morning shows, Ambassador Robert W. Jordan asserted that the Saudi government failed to respond quickly to the U.S. request even after evidence accumulated that a major attack was imminent. "They did not, as of the time of this particular tragic event, provide the security that we had requested," Jordan told the CBS News program "The Early Show."
A U.S. official said the request was made around May 1 and covered more than 300 residential compounds around the country.
In Washington, senior government officials said they are extremely worried about the possibility of terrorist attacks in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Kenya. In the past week, U.S. and foreign intelligence services have seen an increased level of activity among terrorist groups and individuals suspected of planning terrorist strikes, they said.
Meanwhile, Saudi sources here said the government was holding one suspect who turned himself in to authorities on Monday before the bombings. Saudi officials had published the photos of 19 suspected al Qaeda members in newspapers a week earlier, and Saudis say they believe the suspect's detention spurred the attackers to speed up their plans. However, the suspect has been uncooperative, officials said.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud Faisal, said 15 terrorists, all from Saudi Arabia, participated in the attacks. Nine bodies of suspected terrorists have been recovered from the three bombing sites, and an Interior Ministry official said the six others are at large.
Jordan's remarks appear to reflect growing tension between the United States and Saudi Arabia over whether the attacks could have been prevented. The death toll rose to 34 today, including the eight Americans and nine attackers, and nearly 200 people remain injured, many seriously, after cars laden with explosives were detonated at three gated communities Monday night. The attackers shot the security guards -- who were unarmed at two facilities -- before speeding past the gates and exploding bombs deep inside the compounds.
A U.S. official here said Jordan received a phone call from the State Department after midnight telling him to go on the television shows to put pressure on the Saudis. "We're holding their feet to the fire," he said.
But White House and State Department officials were taken aback by Jordan's comments, a State Department official in Washington said, because the Bush administration had decided to emphasize that Saudi Arabia was cooperating.
President Bush spoke to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah by telephone on Tuesday night. Administration officials said Abdullah pledged to capture those responsible and, noting that Saudi lives were lost as well, said the two governments should work closely together on the investigation.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Washington that the United States has "very good cooperation with Saudi Arabia in the war on terrorism, very good cooperation in a number of aspects of it."
A 45-person investigative team from the United States began heading toward Riyadh, with the largest number coming from the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the FBI had wanted more agents, officials decided that the CIA needed a larger role for intelligence liaison and debriefing of possible suspects. "We need to share notes on what we know about these people" between the CIA and the Saudis as the first order of business, the State Department official said.
Saud told reporters that the kingdom had been humbled by the attacks. "The fact that the terrorism happened is an indication of shortcomings, and we have to learn from our mistakes and seek to improve our performance in this respect," he said.
In an interview with a few reporters here after his television appearances, Jordan appeared to play down his comments.
"This was not casual indifference by the Saudis. It was a failure to connect the dots in a way that would have been helpful," Jordan said. "When it is all said and done, if they had provided the armed guards in the compound, would it have made a difference? I'm not sure that it would have." Jordan noted that armed guards did little to prevent the attack at one site, the compound operated by Vinnell Arabia, a local subsidiary of Fairfax-based Vinnell Corp.
Asked about the ambassador's comments in the television interviews, Saud denied that Saudi Arabia had failed to act on such a request. "In each time the American embassy or any other embassy seeks the intensification of security measures, the government fulfills this request," Saud said.
John Burgess, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, said Saudi Arabia briefly enhanced security at some compounds after the request, but then let the matter drop. "The Saudis don't have much staying power," he said. "They don't stiff us on it. They just didn't do a very good job."
Burgess said the request was made at "very high levels" of the Interior Ministry. A ministry official said both countries often make requests for cooperation, but he suggested it would have been impossible to supply security people to all the compounds covered by the U.S. Embassy request.
One U.S. official here said part of the problem is that Saudi Arabia does not have a well-functioning government. "It has a First World country infrastructure, but it's a Third World country," he said. "You go two people down in any agency and it's bureaucratic inertia. It's not malicious, necessarily."
"We're frustrated with where we are," a senior U.S. official said, but there is "not a sense of blame or finger-pointing. It is a sense of, what do we do next to prevent something like this from happening again?"
Saud said the terrorists "will regret what they have done, because they have turned this country into one fist aimed at putting an end to this heinous wound in the body of this nation so that it won't return."
Noting that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were Saudi, Saud said it was fate that resulted in 15 attacking the city this week. He remarked that some Americans have blamed Saudi Arabia for the Sept. 11 terror strikes. "Certainly it goes to the heart of the arguments. No one would accuse us of being responsible for attacking our country," he said.
Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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