GULF SHOCK WAVES

By Bruce W. Nelan

In the steamy darkness of a summer night on the Persian Gulf, Staff Sergeant Alfredo Guerrero was making the rounds of the observation posts under his command. He stepped onto the roof of one of the apartment buildings at the Khobar Towers near Dhahran and said hello to the two other members of the U.S. Air Force security police posted there. Then something caught his eye. Below he saw a white Chevrolet Caprice pulling into a public parking lot adjacent to the compound. Nothing odd about that, but the car was being followed closely by a large tanker truck, and the two vehicles were driving slowly along the edge of the lot. Directly opposite Building 131, where Guerrero stood watching, the Mercedes-Benz tanker backed up to the 10-ft.-high chain-link fence that separated the lot from the military area. Two men leaped out of the truck's cab, into the waiting Caprice, and roared away.

"That was the clicker," Guerrero later told TIME. "They were in a hurry. I felt something was going to happen very soon." He radioed a hasty report to his headquarters, and then he and the two lookouts dashed down to the residential floor below, where they began pounding on doors and yelling, "Get out! Get out!" They made it only to the seventh floor before what Guerrero had feared would happen did happen.

The force of the bomb sheared off the outer wall of Building 131 and left a smoking crater 85 ft. across and 35 ft. deep where the truck had been parked. The shock wave blew in windows and pulverized reinforced concrete, creating a blizzard of slashing, crushing projectiles. Windows in several other buildings, some half a mile away, were also shattered. In the midst of the carnage, Guerrero came upon a dazed and wounded man and helped him down seven flights of stairs to an emergency van that had pulled up outside. While many of the hundred or more officers and enlisted personnel in Building 131 had heard the shouting and headed into the stairwell, away from the blast, 19 airmen were killed and more than 50 were hospitalized.

The explosion prompted a painful review of what had gone wrong. Everyone had been aware of the danger since a smaller bomb killed seven people, including five Americans, at a U.S.-run training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital, last November. Warnings of more outrages had been coming by phone and fax for months, and security measures at military facilities had been stepped up. Troubling long-range strategic questions also demand answers. Is the rule of the royal House of Saud in more danger than the West suspected? Does the presence of about 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia bolster or undercut stability in the land? Could it go the way of Iran? Its future matters immensely because it produces 8 million bbl. of oil a day.

There is no hint that the Clinton Administration is even thinking about pulling out. "It would be a mistake for the U.S. to basically change its mission because of this," President Clinton said last week. The missions over Iraq are being flown without interruption. But if American forces are to stay in the gulf, the U.S. will have to defend them better. Fences and concrete barriers protect the Khobar compound, and after the attack in Riyadh, regular patrols were stepped up and lookouts were posted on rooftops. But no American official believed terrorists could strike with an explosion 10 times the size of the one in Riyadh. As General J.H. Binford Peay, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, implied, the terrorists changed the rules. They showed "exorbitant" capability, Peay said, "in terms of a blast that you don't normally see in the normal kinds of terrorism." Still, it was common knowledge that the airmen were vulnerable, living in apartments facing a public parking lot less than 100 ft. away. "If anything was going to happen, says Senior Airman Dan Williams, who lived in Building 131, "it was going to happen there."

Washington has sent more than 40 FBI agents and other investigators to Dhahran to work with the Saudis, hoping this time for a better reception than they received after the Riyadh bombing. The U.S. always seeks to participate in investigations of incidents in which Americans are killed, and they did so last November. Officials in Washington say the Saudis accepted FBI help until four young suspects were caught, and then cut off contact. The American experts wanted to join in the interrogation of the suspects to learn about their organization, contacts, backers and bosses. The Saudis refused, U.S. officials say, and did not inform the FBI before the four were publicly beheaded last May 31. Intelligence experts think that either the Saudis did not want the Americans to know what they had learned about the size of the dissident movement, or that they were simply taking their customary arrogant stand on dealing with foreigners.

U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns frankly admits, "We have no leads whatsoever," but American experts assume that the terrorists this time are homegrown Saudis, probably Islamic extremists, as were the four who were beheaded. Some officials suspect the cases are linked, that it is the same group, and that the bombers were fulfilling their threat to punish Americans if the four suspects were executed. Saudi and U.S. officials do not rule out the possibility that another country was involved.

The U.S. knows little about the extremist movements in the closed Saudi kingdom, but it is certain that they have been gaining strength in the years since the Gulf War. The most religious Saudis resented the presence of 541,000 American troops on and near their holy soil. Saudis also asked themselves why they had spent billions on planes and tanks if they had to ask the U.S. to defend them anyway. Many opponents of the regime appear to be drawn from the thousands of devout volunteers who received training and fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Others are conservatives who favor peaceful reform, and others are violent fanatics. Their strength is unknown, since political organizations are outlawed and they operate clandestinely.

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S. and one of the most influential Saudi officials, tells TIME that "Islamic radicals are very, very small, and looked upon in this country as outcasts. Saudi Arabia is probably the strictest country in administering Islamic law as a way of life. Islamic extremists are not a threat to the stability of the country." Meanwhile, Mohammed Mass'ari, a leading Islamic militant in exile in London, says the extreme groups are splintered. "The number is big, dozens if not hundreds," he says, "but the membership in each group is small: five, 10 or 15 people."

Western policymakers are worried that the kingdom's current economic slump is providing new recruits to the ranks of the opposition. Lower oil prices, huge government debts and the staggering $60 billion cost of the war have combined to cut Saudi Arabia's per capita income in half. The soaring population is generating a wave of young, middle-class urbanites who are coming out of strictly religious universities to find there are no jobs for them. Unemployment among young people may be as high as 25%. Set these conditions against the high living and charges of corruption in the House of Saud, and bitterness is the result.

An additional problem for the monarchy is that it is in the midst of a prolonged and unsettling succession. King Fahd, 75, suffered a stroke last year just after the Riyadh bombing and has not fully recovered. His memory is impaired. Even so, he has reclaimed the powers he transferred temporarily to Crown Prince Abdullah, 73. Abdullah, Fahd's half brother, continues to manage things day to day, even though he does not have the kind of authority he needs to control an absolute monarchy. Bandar says of Fahd, "The night of the bombing, I was with him from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. discussing issues. These are not the working hours of somebody who is not healthy. He is discharging his responsibilities." The family's task now is to arrange a quiet retirement for Fahd and a smooth transition to Abdullah, one that does not set off dangerous rivalries among the brothers of Fahd and Abdullah.

At the economic summit in Lyons, France, last week, Secretary of State Warren Christopher dismissed the idea that the monarchy was threatened. "This is a solid and stable government," he insisted. "Saudi Arabia's stability," says another senior official, "is always a concern, but the fact that this group resorted to terror, not a popular demonstration," indicates it is small and weak. Comparisons to Iran under the Shah, this official says, are mistaken. "There aren't large-scale demonstrations, a regime losing its will to govern or a vocal charismatic leader in exile."

The men who died at Khobar were there to protect Saudi Arabia from an external threat, not an internal one, yet that is what they fell victim to. On Thursday the bodies were flown back to the U.S. That same day, pilots from the 58th Fighter Squadron who lived in Building 131 returned home, having completed their normal 90-day tour of duty. "Their 90 days was up," said Major James Stratford. "They left. But some of them went home in coffins."

--Reported by Scott MacLeod/Dhahran, Dean Fischer and Mark Thompson/Washington and J.F.O. McAllister with Clinton

With reporting by SCOTT MACLEOD/DHAHRAN, DEAN FISCHER AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER WITH CLINTON