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Now Riyadh wants a quick response. Having shared the fruits of their investigation with FBI Director Louis Freeh, the Saudis hope to influence the Clinton Administration in selecting an appropriate and relatively immediate punishment. Washington is prepared to believe Tehran is involved but wants to see solid evidence. If a link is demonstrated, U.S. policymakers will have to come up with an effective riposte. A U.S. attack on Iran would make martyrs of the victims. An economic embargo against Tehran would be ineffective because the Europeans and the Japanese would not support it. Any other military attack, say on Iran's submarine and naval bases, may simply draw Iranian fire to Saudi targets across the gulf. A covert campaign against Iran's terror network could escalate terrorist activity around the world.
Meantime, the Saudi government has been busy trying to snuff out any violent dissent among the Shi'ite minority (3 million out of the kingdom's 19 million citizens). Along with hundreds of Sunnis, several hundred Saudi Shi'ites have been detained in the past five months, say local leaders in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where most of the indigenous Shi'ites live. Even as he sits beneath a framed photograph of Iran's late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Sheik Abdul Hamid Khuniz Katti, a senior Islamic judge in the Eastern Province, claims, "The Shi'ites in the Kingdom are not enemies of the government, in the open or in their hearts. And we don't ask other people to work against it either." However, discrimination against Shi'ites is on the rise. "We are fifth-class citizens," says Wadia, a Shi'ite employee of Aramco, the giant Saudi oil company. In 1980, many were caught up in the fervor that followed the ascendancy of Khomeini in Iran. But a swift and terrible response by Riyadh silenced that rebellion and gives any would-be revolutionaries qualms to this day. The recent crackdown that yielded the 40 suspects may have gutted the so-called Saudi Hizballah, which had an estimated 500 members.
Any U.S. military response against Iran that is clearly elicited by the Saudi government will do little for the popularity of the 5,000 American troops in the kingdom. Already, many Saudis believe American troops act as the palace guard of the repressively autocratic Saud family, headed by ailing King Fahd and his half-brother Crown Prince Addullah. For fundamentalists, the U.S. is to Saudi Arabia what the Soviet Union was to Afghanistan: an infidel occupation force propping up a regime that persecutes true Muslims.
The regime's harshness restrains most dissidents, but two turned up surreptitiously to talk to TIME's Scott MacLeod in Riyadh. Both unhesitatingly accused their government of repression and corruption. Both also denounced the presence of the American military personnel in the kingdom as a desecration of Islam's holiest places--Mecca and Medina. The two dissidents say activity by moderate reformers has been paralyzed by the clampdown that followed the two bombings. "The iron fist is working," says one. But even as he abhors violence and terrorism, he adds, "in the long run [repression] will be counterproductive. Eventually the passive opposition will make the quantum leap to being an active opposition."