The cruise missiles strike on Iraq in June 1993 were ordered by U.S. President Bill Clinton as both a retaliation and a warning triggered by the attempted assassination by alleged Iraqi intelligence agents on former U.S. President George H. W. Bush while on a visit to Kuwait from 14–16 April 1993. On June 27, 1993, 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched by two U.S. Navy warships into downtown Baghdad. These hit a building which was believed to be the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in the Mansour district of Baghdad. Iraq claimed that nine civilians were killed in the attack and three civilian houses destroyed. George H. W. Bush assassination plot On the night of 13 April 1993, a day before George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait City to commemorate the international coalition victory against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaiti authorities arrested 14 persons suspected in the plot to kill Bush using explosives hidden in a Toyota Landcruiser. The Kuwaitis recovered the Landcruiser, which contained between 80 and 90 kilograms of plastic explosives, composed mostly of RDX, connected to a detonator (called the "Bush device" in a FBI laboratory report). They also recovered ten cube-shaped plastic explosive devices with detonators (called "cube bombs" in an FBI laboratory report) from the Landcruiser. Investigators from the FBI, Secret Service, and other agencies traveled to Kuwait immediately after the arrests were made public. The Clinton administration said it would consider action against Iraq if it had positive proof of Iraqi complicity in an assassination attempt. Responsible party Clinton was convinced the attack was masterminded by the Iraqi Intelligence Service by three pieces of evidence. First, the suspects in the plot made detailed confessions to FBI agents in Kuwait, including two alleged leaders of the plot, Ra'ad Asadi and Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali, both of whom were Iraqi nationals. Asadi stated that he was responsible for directing the car bomb, while Ghazali said that he would have been responsible for detonating the bomb to kill Bush. Second, FBI bomb experts linked the captured 175-pound car bomb found in Kuwait City to previous explosives made in Iraq. Third, intelligence assessments noted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had publicly threatened Bush, including promising to hunt down and punish Bush on Iraqi official media, even after Bush left office. An analysis by the CIA's Counterterrorism Mission Center from May 13, 1993 claimed