At the end of the month, as I was preparing to leave for Lyon, France, for the annual G-7 conference, which would primarily be devoted to terrorism, nineteen air force personnel were killed and almost three hundred Americans and others were injured when terrorists drove a truck containing a powerful bomb to a security barrier just outside Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. When an American patrol approached the truck, two of its occupants fled and the bomb exploded. I sent an FBI team of more than forty investigators and forensic experts to work with Saudi authorities. King Fahd called me to express his condolences and solidarity, and to pledge the commitment of his government to apprehend and punish the men who had killed our airmen. Eventually, Saudi Arabia would execute the people it determined to be responsible for the attack. The Saudis had allowed us to establish the base after the Gulf War in the hope that having U.S. forces “pre-positioned” in the Gulf would deter further aggression by Saddam Hussein and allow us to respond quickly if deterrence was unsuccessful. It achieved that objective, but the base also made our forces more vulnerable to terrorists in the region. The security provisions at Khobar were plainly inadequate; the truck had been able to get too close to the building because our people and the Saudis had underestimated the ability of terrorists to build a bomb that powerful. I appointed General Wayne Downing, former commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, head of a commission to recommend what steps we should take to make our troops stationed overseas more secure. As we prepared for the G-7 summit, I asked my staff to draw up recommended steps that the international community could take to work together more effectively against global terrorism. At Lyon, the leaders agreed to more than forty of them, including speeding up the extradition and prosecution of terrorists, doing more to seize the resources that funded their violence, improving our internal defenses, and limiting terrorists’ access to high-tech communications equipment as much as possible. By 1996, my administration had settled on a strategy for fighting terror that focused on preventing serious incidents, capturing and punishing terrorists through international cooperation, interrupting the flow of money and communications to terrorist organizations, cutting off access to weapons of mass destruction, and isolating and imposing sanctions on nations that support terrorism. As President Reagan’s bombing raid on Libya in 1986 and the attack I ordered on Iraq’s intelligence headquarters in 1993 demonstrated, American power could deter states that were directly involved in terrorist acts against us; neither nation attempted another one. However, it was more difficult to get at non-state terrorist organizations; the military and economic pressures that were effective against nations were not as easily applied to them.
The strategy had brought many successes—we had prevented several planned terrorist attacks, including attempts to bomb the Holland and Lincoln tunnels in New York and to blow up several planes flying from the Philippines to the United States, and had brought terrorists back to the United States from all over the world to stand trial. On the other hand, terror is more than a form of international organized crime; because of their stated political objectives, terrorist groups often enjoy both state sponsorship and popular support. Moreover, getting to the bottom of the networks could raise difficult and dangerous questions, as the Khobar Towers investigation did when the possibility of Iran’s support for the terrorists was raised. Even if we had a good defense against attacks, would law enforcement be a sufficient offensive strategy against terrorists? If not, would greater reliance on military options work? In the middle of 1996, it was clear that we didn’t have all the answers on how to deal with attacks on Americans in this country and overseas, and that the problem would be with us for years to come. The summer began with good news at home and abroad. Boris Yeltsin had been forced into a runoff on July 3 against the ultra-nationalist Gennady Zyuganov. The first election was close, but Boris won the runoff handily, after a vigorous campaign across all his country’s eleven time zones that included American-style campaign events and TV ads. The election was a ratification of Yeltsin’s leadership to secure democracy, modernize the economy, and reach out to the West. Russia still had a number of problems, but I believed it was moving in the right direction.
Things were moving in the right direction in America, too, as the unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent, with 10 million new jobs, economic growth at 4.2 percent for the quarter, and a deficit that had dropped to less than half what it was when I took office. Wages were also rising. The next day the stock market fell 115 points, prompting me to tease Bob Rubin again about how much Wall Street hated it when average Americans did well. Actually, it was more complicated than that. The market is about the future; when things are really good, investors tend to think they’ll get worse. Soon they changed their minds, and the market resumed its upward movement.
On July 17, TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island, killing some 230 people. At the time everyone assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—that this was a terrorist act; there was even speculation that the plane had been downed by a rocket fired from a boat in Long Island Sound. While I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, it was clear that we had to do more to strengthen aviation safety. Hillary and I went to Jamaica, New York, to meet with the victims’ families, and I announced new measures to increase air travel security. We had been working on the problem since 1993, with a proposal to modernize the air traffic control system; add more than 450 safety inspectors and the issuance of uniform safety standards; and test new high-tech explosive detection machines. Now I said we would hand-search more luggage and screen more bags on domestic and international flights, and would require preflight inspections of every plane cargo hold and cabin before every flight. I also asked Al Gore to head a commission to review aviation safety and security and the air traffic control system, and report back in forty-five days.
Just ten days after the crash, we had an undisputed terrorist incident when a pipe bomb exploded at the Olympics in Atlanta, killing two people. Hillary and I had gone to the opening ceremonies, which featured Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic flame. Hillary and Chelsea loved the Olympics and spent more time attending the events than I did, but I was able to visit with the American team, as well as with athletes from several other nations. Irish, Croatian, and Palestinian athletes thanked me for America’s efforts to bring peace to their homelands. North and South Korean Olympians sat at adjoining tables in the dining room and talked to each other. The Olympics symbolized the world at its best, bringing people together across old divisions. The pipe bomb planted by a homegrown terrorist who had still not been apprehended was a reminder of how vulnerable the forces of openness and cooperation were to those who rejected the values and rules required to build an integrated global community. On August 5, at George Washington University, I gave an extended analysis of how terrorism would affect our future, saying that it had become “an equal-opportunity destroyer, with no respect for borders.” I outlined the steps we were taking to combat “the enemy of our generation” and said we would prevail if we maintained our confidence and our leadership as the world’s “indispensable force for peace and freedom.”
The rest of August was taken up with bill signings, the party conventions, and a positive development in Whitewater World. With the election approaching and the budget fight at least temporarily resolved, members of Congress in both parties were eager to give the American people evidence of bipartisan progress. As a result, they produced a raft of progressive legislation the White House had been fighting for. I signed the Food Quality Protection Act, to increase the safeguarding of vegetables, fruits, and grains from harmful pesticides; the Safe Drinking Water Act, to reduce pollution and provide $10 billion in loans to upgrade municipal water systems in the wake of deaths and illnesses caused by the contamination of drinking water by cryptosporidium; and the bill to increase the minimum wage by 90 cents an hour, give small businesses tax relief for new investments in equipment and for hiring new employees, make it easier for small businesses to offer their employees pension plans with a new 401(k) plan, and provide a new incentive that was very important to Hillary, a $5,000 tax credit for adopting a child, with $6,000 for a child with special needs.