The Boston Globe May 15, 2003
US company has long history with Saudis
By Michael Kranish
wASHINGTON -- Vinnell Corp., the American company whose employees were killed Monday by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, has been a key link between the US and Saudi governments, providing retired US military officials to train the elite armed forces that protect the royal family. That link appears to have led the Virginia-based company to be a target of Al Qaeda terrorists, analysts said.
Vinnell has a sometimes controversial history with the Saudis. It includes a congressional investigation of its activities, questions about whether it has ties to the CIA, and past links to President Bush and his father, President George H. W. Bush.
''They hit Vinnell as opposed to McDonald's. It has certainly been a centerpiece of the US-Saudi relationship for a very long time,'' said John Pike, a defense analyst at Globalsecurity.org. ''It is absolutely at the core of the legitimacy of the monarchy and the symbiotic relationship between these two countries.''
Since 1975, Vinnell has trained the Saudi National Guard, which is far more prominent than the US National Guard. The Saudi guard is overseen by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and is considered by some analysts to be the most effective armed force in Saudi Arabia.
Judith Kipper, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: ''The National Guard have the biggest group of Americans working for them of all the official Saudi things. This is a very big job for Vinnell. It is not just being a subcontractor to build something.''
Nine employees of Vinnell were killed Monday night by terrorists with suspected links to Al Qaeda. The attackers, using a car bomb, crashed into a company housing complex and blew up a building.
The Washington Post reported today that Vinnell and US officials said they had no plans to publicly identify the dead.
A spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, Edward Dickens, cited ''privacy laws'' and said the company had asked that the names not be released. A Vinnell spokesman, Jay McCaffrey, said the company had made such a request.
The newspaper identified three victims: Obadiah Y. Abdullah, a former Army sergeant with a wife and daughter in Colorado Springs; Clifford Lawson, 46, a retired Army staff sergeant, whose wife, Grace, lives in Atlanta; and Todd Bair, 37, a Lake Wales, Fla., native who retired from the Army a year ago this month.
In 1995, a car bombing at a building shared by Vinnell and the National Guard, according to news accounts from the time, killed five Americans, but none of them were Vinnell employees.
Vinnell, founded in 1931 and a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, operates in Saudi Arabia under a contract from the US Department of Defense that is managed by the US Army Materiel Command, according to Janis Lamar a spokeswoman for Vinnell. The company's latest four-year contract, effective in 1999, is worth $159 million, she said.
From the beginning of the arrangement in Saudi Arabia, the company's closeness to the Pentagon has caused controversy, according to a book published this year, ''The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group.''
The title of the book, written by Dan Briody, refers to the Carlyle Group, which owned Vinnell from 1992 to 1997 and is well-known for its employment of former top US government officials.
Vinnell began its Saudi work in 1975 when it received a $77 million contract to train the national guard.
A congressional investigation was launched into whether Vinnell was performing mercenary work for the Saudis and a clause, later dropped from the initial contract, that forbade the employment of Jews, the book said.
Company officials denied doing mercenary work. The book also quotes an unnamed Vinnell executive as saying that Vinnell ''had been a cover for the CIA for decades.''
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
