Khobar Towers bombing
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The Khobar Towers bombing was a truck-bomb attack on June 25, 1996 that destroyed a U.S. military housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel. John Kiriakou, then a CIA officer living in Bahrain, recalls the date precisely because it was his wedding anniversary and his wife had just given birth to their second son; he was on the phone with her, roughly 18 miles from the blast, when the explosion shattered every window in the front of his house.

The scene

Kiriakou was one of only two embassy staff who held a Saudi visa, so he was sent to the consulate in Dhahran the next morning, driving over with another CIA officer alongside Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who flew in with a contingent of CIA personnel. He says he had never seen devastation like it: the front half of the apartment building had been sheared off, resembling the Oklahoma City bombing, with blood visible on the ceilings of rooms where servicemen had been asleep, killed by the shock wave of the blast crushing them against the ceiling. The truck bomb's crater was 30 feet deep, deep enough that water seeped in from the Persian Gulf.

Who was blamed, and who Kiriakou says did it

Kiriakou says the U.S. government, under pressure from Saudi Arabia, worked hard to pin the bombing on Iran and an Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah cell despite there being no evidence for it. He distinguishes this small, largely powerless Saudi Hezbollah, a group of perhaps a couple of dozen men who hated the Saudi royal family for oppressing them, from the much larger Lebanese and Syrian Hezbollah, and argues Saudi Hezbollah never had the firepower for a blast of that scale. In Kiriakou's account, the actual perpetrator was a radical Saudi group, a predecessor of al-Qaeda, not yet formally named at the time, that had previously carried out the OPM-SANG bombing in Riyadh, killing around five people at a grocery store CIA staff used to shop at; al-Qaeda itself took credit for the Khobar attack.

The lookout who limited the death toll

Kiriakou says the death toll was held down because an Air Force lookout posted on the roof spotted the truck driver and a companion running away after being turned back at a checkpoint. The lookout had roughly three or four minutes to run floor to floor screaming for people to evacuate before the truck detonated, an act Kiriakou credits with saving dozens of lives.

See also

- Hezbollah
- Saudi-Iran diplomatic rivalry
- John Kiriakou
