TN:Saudi Arabia did not stop terrorist attack, ‘God did'
WASHINGTON – When al-Qaida suicide bombers tried on Feb. 24, 2006, to blow up Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, arguably the world’s most important petroleum hub, it was taken as a sign of strength that internal security had foiled the attack.
Secret U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and shared with McClatchy Newspapers and other news organizations show otherwise.
Even though 70 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports flow through the Abqaiq facility, Saudi security forces were woefully ill prepared to defend it, investigations into the attack found, according to the cables. Efforts to fix the problems were hampered by bickering between the Saudi state oil company and the country’s Ministry of the Interior, the cables indicate.
The security of Saudi Arabia’s oil is still a concern five years later as neighboring countries sink into political turmoil and the kingdom confronts growing restiveness among its own Shiite Muslim population in the Eastern Province, the heart of the Saudi oil industry.
Last week, when members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries failed to increase production in a move that Western officials had hoped would help curb rising crude oil prices, Saudi Arabia announced it would unilaterally pump more oil. Crude prices immediately dropped.
A successful terrorist attack on Saudi oil facilities would wreak havoc on the kingdom’s ability to take a similar step in the future.
“We did not save Abqaiq, God did,” Prince Muhammad bin Naif said in a secret cable that the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, sent to the State Department in Washington on Aug. 11, 2008.
After the attempted attacks in Abqaiq, the State Department cables show, the U.S. and the Saudi government set up a joint working group to find ways to improve security. The U.S. even drafted a team from the Energy Department’s prestigious Sandia National Laboratories to conduct an assessment of design and safety weaknesses throughout the Saudi oil industry.
U.S. officials soon found, however, that infighting between the Saudi state oil company Aramco and the security-minded Ministry of Interior made improvements in security difficult.
