Saudis Facing Return of Radicals

That began to change in May 2003, as radicals launched attacks not just against Westerners, but also against Saudi citizens and the government.

"The Saudi government was jolted out of its denial," said Jonathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Although the government now says it takes terrorism much more seriously, its military and security forces were not trained or equipped to handle the threat and have had a hard time adjusting.

More than a dozen Saudi police officers and National Guardsmen have died in shootouts, in many cases because they were outgunned. In May, three of four gunmen who killed 22 people and took hostages in a Western office and residential compound in Khobar escaped, even though they were surrounded by hundreds of security forces, including a special anti-terrorist Saudi SWAT team.

"Our security apparatus is not well trained in combating terrorism, but they are learning," Ibrahim Alebaji, a former deputy interior minister, told Saudi television last month.

Saudi Arabia's rulers have requested assistance from Western governments to help with training and intelligence gathering. Western counterterrorism officials said the Saudi capability to fight terrorism was improving, but that the kingdom still needed to reorganize its many overlapping military, law-enforcement and security agencies.

"Saudi Arabia did not believe -- or did not want to believe -- that it had a problem for a long time," said a German intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not underestimating the problem any longer . . . But they first need to create the structures to fight the problem."

Saudi officials used to bristle at such critiques, but have begun to acknowledge the need to revamp their anti-terrorism bureaucracy. Two weeks ago, Prince Saud of the Foreign Ministry met with Western diplomats and businessmen in Jiddah to reassure them that the government recognized the challenge.

"He was quite explicit," said another Western diplomat who attended the meeting and also spoke on condition of anonymity. "He said, 'Yes, we have made mistakes. And we are learning from those mistakes.'"

Technical assistance from the West has already produced results. A newly trained Saudi forensics unit was recently able to confirm, based on physical evidence, that a single al Qaeda cell was responsible for carrying out at least five separate attacks, according to a Western official.

Researchers Robert Thomason and Margot Williams in Washington contributed to this report.