FBI agents sent to Kuwait to investigate the car bomb assassination threat against Bush believed the entire operation was bogus. They believed the Kuwaiti government rounded up a few Iraqi whiskey smugglers, planted Iraqi ordnance left in Kuwait by Iraqi forces as "evidence," and staged the entire assassination plot in order to ingratiate themselves to Bush and put pressure on the Clinton administration to retaliate against Iraq. The FBI team that interrogated the accused Iraqi "assasins" sent their reports back to FBI headquarters by secure fax rather than official State Department communications channels because those circuits are routinely monitored by the CIA and National Security Agency and would have assuredly come to the attention of Woolsey and Bush's allies at Langley. The faxes consisted of 30 to 50 pages per night. A Kuwaiti judge later dismissed the assassination charges against Iraq due to lack of evidence.

After the Clinton administration decided to send 23 cruise missiles into Iraq on June 27, 1993, Gnehm, eager to please Bush and Clinton, called Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Shaikh Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah (the former Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.) at his home during the wee hours of the morning to request permission for the U.S. cruise missiles to overfly Kuwaiti airspace on their way into Iraq. (It was the daughter of Sabah named "Nayirah," it will be recalled, who made up a phony story about witnessing Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators on to the floor before a carefully contrived October 10, 1990 phony House "hearing" chaired by Democratic Representative from California Tom Lantos and organized by the Saudi and Kuwaiti shill public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Nayirah was Nayirah al Sabah and she was not in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation but in Washington, DC). Gnehm personally dictated the contents of the overflight permission cable to National Security Adviser Anthony Lake at the White House ("granted diplomatic overflight clearance for cruise missiles.") Some of the U.S. cruise missiles hit civilian residential areas in Baghdad, including the home of famous Arab artist Leyla Attar, who was killed in the attack. Gnehm, a fluent Arabic speaker, is reported by embassy staff to have been too close for comfort to the Kuwaiti government. That resulted in conflicts with embassy principals, including the Regional Security Officer and the US Marine contingent.