The Kingdom and the Towers
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-2011-201108?printable=true
Was there a foreign government behind the 9/11 attacks? A decade later,
Americans still haven't been given the whole story, while a key 28-page
section of Congress's Joint Inquiry report remains censored. Gathering years
of leaks and leads, in an adaptation from their new book, Anthony Summers
and Robbyn Swan examine the connections between Saudi Arabia and the
hijackers (15 of whom were Saudi), the Bush White House's decision to ignore
or bury evidence, and the frustration of lead investigators—including
9/11-commission staffers, counterterrorism officials, and senators on both
sides of the aisle.
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
August 2011
TROUBLING LINKS From left: King Abdullah, Prince Naif, Osama bin Laden,
Prince Bandar, and Prince Turki—Saudis all, as were 15 of the 19 hijackers
of 9/11. Large photograph by Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris; bottom, from left, by
Ludovic/REA/Redux, by Li Zhen/Xinhua/Landov, from Getty Images, by Hassan
Ammar/AFP/Getty Images, by Hasan Jamali/A.P. Images.
Adapted from The Eleventh Day by Anthony Summers and Robynn Swan to be
published this month by Ballantine Books; © 2011 by the authors.
For 10 years now, a major question about 9/11 has remained unresolved. It
was, as 9/11-commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, "Had
the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?" There was
information that pointed to the answer, but the commissioners apparently
deemed it too disquieting to share in full with the public.
The idea that al-Qaeda had not acted alone was there from the start. "The
terrorists do not function in a vacuum," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
told reporters the week after 9/11. "I know a lot, and what I have said, as
clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people." Pressed
to elaborate, Rumsfeld was silent for a long moment. Then, saying it was a
sensitive matter, he changed the subject.
Three years later, the commission would consider whether any of three
foreign countries in particular might have had a role in the attacks. Two
were avowed foes of the United States: Iraq and Iran. The third had long
been billed as a close friend: Saudi Arabia.
In its report, the commission stated that it had seen no "evidence
indicating that Iraq cooperated with al-Qaeda in developing or carrying out
any attacks against the United States."
Iran, the commission found, had long had contacts with al-Qaeda and had
allowed its operatives—including a number of the future hijackers—to travel
freely through its airports. Though there was no evidence that Iran "was
aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack," the
commissioners called on the government to investigate further.
This year, in late May, attorneys for bereaved 9/11 family members said
there was revealing new testimony from three Iranian defectors. Former
senior commission counsel Dietrich Snell was quoted as saying in an
affidavit that there was now "convincing evidence the government of Iran
provided material support to al-Qaeda in the planning and execution of the
9/11 attack." That evidence, however, has yet to surface.
As for Saudi Arabia, America's purported friend, you would have thought from
the reaction of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that the
commission had found nothing dubious in his country's role. "The clear
statements by this independent, bipartisan commission," he declared, "have
debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia." Yet no
finding in the report categorically exonerated Saudi Arabia.
The commission's decision as to what to say on the subject had been made
amid discord and tension. Late one night in 2004, as last-minute changes to
the report were being made, investigators who had worked on the Saudi angle
received alarming news. Their team leader, Dietrich Snell, was at the
office, closeted with executive director Philip Zelikow, making major
changes to their material and removing key elements.
The investigators, Michael Jacobson and Rajesh De, hurried to the office to
confront Snell. With lawyerly caution, he said he thought there was
insufficient substance to their case against the Saudis. They considered the
possibility of resigning, then settled for a compromise. Much of the telling
information they had collected would survive in the report, but only in tiny
print, hidden in the endnotes.
The commissioners did say in the body of the report that the long official
friendship of the United States and Saudi Arabia could not be unconditional.
The relationship had to be about more than oil, had to include—and this in
bold type—"a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred."
It had been far from clear, and for the longest time, that the Saudis were
thus committed. More than seven years before 9/11, the first secretary at
the Saudi mission to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Khilewi, had defected
to the United States, bringing with him thousands of pages of documents
that, he said, showed the regime's corruption, abuse of human rights, and
support for terrorism. At the same time, he addressed a letter to then crown
prince Abdullah, calling for "a move towards democracy." The Saudi royals,
Khilewi said, responded by threatening his life. The U.S. government, for
its part, offered him little protection. F.B.I. officials, moreover,
declined to accept the documents the defecting diplomat had brought with
him.
In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke
of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World
Trade Center's Twin Towers. "A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic
passport," he said, "gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the
World Trade Center bombing," when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the
Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, "is
secret and goes through Saudi intelligence."
The reference to a Saudi citizen having funded Yousef closely fit the part
played by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa. He was active in
the Philippines, fronted as a charity organizer at the relevant time, and
founded a charity that gave money to Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
chief al-Qaeda planner of 9/11, during the initial plotting to destroy U.S.
airliners.
When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the
United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he
was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine
and a welcome home from "a high-ranking official." A Philippine newspaper
would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime
minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi
throne.
In June 1996, according to published reports, while in Paris for the
biennial international weapons bazaar, a group including a Saudi prince and
Saudi financiers gathered at the Royal Monceau hotel, near the Saudi
Embassy. The subject was bin Laden and what to do about him. After two
recent bombings of American targets in Saudi Arabia, one of them just that
month, the fear was that the Saudi elite itself would soon be targeted. At
the meeting at the Monceau, French intelligence reportedly learned, it was
decided that bin Laden was to be kept at bay by payment of huge sums in
protection money.
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed
Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia's General
Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed
not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and
material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden's extradition, and
not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses,
meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
Special Relationships
After 9/11, Prince Turki would deny that any such deal was done with bin
Laden. Other Saudi royals, however, may have been involved in payoff
arrangements. A former Clinton administration official has claimed—and U.S.
intelligence sources concurred—that at least two Saudi princes had been
paying, on behalf of the kingdom, what amounted to protection money since
1995. The former official added, "The deal was, they would turn a blind eye
to what he was doing elsewhere. 'You don't conduct operations here, and we
won't disrupt them elsewhere.' "
American and British official sources, speaking later with Simon Henderson,
Baker Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, named the two
princes in question. They were, Henderson told the authors, Prince Naif, the
interior minister, and Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged
payments, according to Henderson's sources, had amounted to "hundreds of
millions of dollars." It had been "Saudi official money—not their own."
Before 9/11, American officials visiting Riyadh usually discovered that it
was futile to ask the Saudis for help in fighting terrorism. George Tenet,
who became C.I.A. director during Bill Clinton's second term, vividly
recalled an audience he was granted by Prince Naif, the crown prince's
brother. Naif, who oversaw domestic intelligence, began the exchange with
"an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi
'special' relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep
security-related information from their U.S. allies."
There came a moment when Tenet had had enough. Breaching royal etiquette, he
placed his hand on the prince's knee and said, "Your Royal Highness, what do
you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post
that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qaeda
murderers?" Naif's reaction, Tenet thought, was what looked "like a
prolonged state of shock."
On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, F.B.I. director Louis
Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O'Neill that he thought the Saudi
officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. "You've got to be
kidding," retorted O'Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words.
"They didn't give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass."
Several years later, in two long conversations with Jean-Charles Brisard,
author of a study on terrorist financing for a French intelligence agency,
O'Neill was still venting his frustration. "All the answers, all the clues
that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization," he said,
"are in Saudi Arabia." The answers and the clues, however, remained out of
reach, in part, O'Neill told Brisard, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil
meant that Saudi Arabia had "much more leverage on us than we have on the
kingdom." And, he added, because "high-ranking personalities and families in
the Saudi kingdom" had close ties to bin Laden.
These conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.
At his residence outside Washington on the morning of September 11, Prince
Bandar rushed out an embassy statement. The kingdom, it read, "condemned the
regrettable and inhuman bombings and acts which took place today. . . .
Saudi Arabia strongly condemns such acts, which contravene all religious
values and human civilized concepts; and extends sincere condolences."
Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel,
relations between Riyadh and Washington had recently become unprecedentedly
shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America's apparent
complacency over the plight of the Palestinians. That spring he had
pointedly declined an invitation to the White House. Three weeks before
9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot
on the head of a Palestinian woman, he had snapped. Bandar, the crown
prince's nephew, was told to deliver an uncompromising message to President
Bush.
"I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias whereby the blood of an
Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian
child. . . . A time comes when peoples and nations part. . . . Starting
today, you go your way and we will go our way. From now on, we will protect
our national interests, regardless of where America's interests lie in the
region." There was more, much more, and it rocked the Bush administration.
The president responded with a placatory letter that seemed to go far toward
the Saudi position of endorsing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
Then came the shattering events of Tuesday the 11th. In Riyadh within 24
hours—himself now in turn placatory—Abdullah pulled the lever that gave his
nation its only real power, the economic sword it could draw or sheathe at
will. He ordered that nine million barrels of oil be dispatched to the
United States over the next two weeks. The certainty of supply had the
effect, it is said, of averting what had otherwise been a possibility at
that time—an oil shortage that would have pushed prices through the roof and
caused, on top of the economic effects of the 9/11 calamity, a major
financial crisis.
Into the mix, on Wednesday the 12th, came troubling news. In a phone call
that night, a C.I.A. official told Ambassador Bandar that 15 of the
hijackers had been Saudis. As Bandar recalled it, he felt the world
collapsing around him. "That was a disaster," Crown Prince Abdullah's
foreign-affairs adviser Adel al-Jubeir has said, "because bin Laden, at that
moment, had made in the minds of Americans Saudi Arabia into an enemy."
Royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and return
home. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at Caesars Palace
hotel and casino in Las Vegas, decamped within hours of the attacks to the
Four Seasons. They felt "extremely concerned for their personal safety,"
they explained to the local F.B.I. field office, and bodyguards apparently
deemed the Four Seasons more secure.
In Washington, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden
family. One of Osama's brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called
the Saudi Embassy wanting to know where he could best go to be safe. He was
installed in a room at the Watergate Hotel and told to stay there until
advised that transportation was available. Across the country, more than 20
bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.
In Lexington, Kentucky, the mecca of Thoroughbred racing in America, Prince
Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd's, had been attending the annual
yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed quickly began to round up members
of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his son and a couple
of friends, who were in Florida, to charter a plane and get themselves to
Lexington to connect with the plane he was taking home. They managed it, one
of them told the security man hired for the flight, because "his father or
his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr."
Late on the night of the 13th, Prince Bandar's assistant called the F.B.I.'s
assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the
assistant said, in getting bin Laden "family members" out of the country.
Watson said Saudi officials should call the White House or the State
Department. The request found its way to counterterrorism coordinator
Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the
flights. He has said he has "no recollection" of having cleared it with
anyone more senior in the administration.
An F.B.I. memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge
that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the
investigation. Asked on CNN the same year whether he could say unequivocally
that no one on the evacuation flights had been involved in 9/11, Saudi
Embassy information officer Nail al-Jubeir responded by saying he was sure
of only two things, that "there is the existence of God, and then we will
die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don't know."
Saudis in Denial
In spite of the fact that it had almost immediately become known that 15 of
those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush
did not hold Saudi Arabia's official representative in Washington at arm's
length. As early as the evening of September 13, he kept a scheduled
appointment to receive Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men had
known each other for years. They reportedly greeted each other with a
friendly embrace, smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, and conversed with
Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
There is a photograph of the meeting, which has been published in the past.
This year, however, when the authors asked the George W. Bush presidential
library for a copy, the library responded in an e-mail that the former
president's office was "not inclined to release the image from the balcony
at this time."
It would soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush
administration wanted rapprochement. The president would invite Crown Prince
Abdullah to visit the United States, press him to come when he hesitated,
and—when he accepted—welcome him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Dick
Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were there, along with Secretary of State Colin
Powell and First Lady Laura Bush.
It seems that 9/11 barely came up during the discussions. Speaking with the
press afterward, the president cut off one reporter when he began to raise
the subject.
Official Saudi Arabia was tortoise-slow in acknowledging even the fact that
almost all of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Two days after Bandar
was given that information, his spokesman said the terrorists had probably
used stolen identities.
"There is no proof or evidence," claimed Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, minister of
Islamic affairs, "that Saudis carried out these attacks." Prince Sultan
doubted whether only bin Laden and his followers were responsible, and
hinted that "another power with advanced technical expertise" must have been
behind 9/11. As of December 2001, Prince Naif was saying he still did not
believe 15 hijackers had been Saudis.
Not until February 2002 did Naif acknowledge the truth. "The names we have
got confirmed [it]," he then conceded. "Their families have been notified. .
. . I believe they were taken advantage of in the name of religion, and
regarding certain issues pertaining to the Arab nation, especially the issue
of Palestine."
Even after that admission, Sultan and Naif were not done. They began
pointing to a familiar enemy. "It is enough to see a number of [U.S.]
congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes," Sultan said, "to explain the
allegations against us." In late 2002, Naif blamed the "Zionists," saying,
"We put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11
and who benefited from them I think [the Zionists] are behind these events."
As the months passed, leading Saudis would suggest publicly that their
nation had been entirely open with the United States on the security front
all along—even claim that they had alerted Washington in advance to possible
calamity.
A year after 9/11, Prince Turki expounded at length on the relationship the
G.I.D. had had with the C.I.A. From about 1996, he wrote, "at the
instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we
had collected on bin Laden and al-Qaeda with the C.I.A. And in 1997 the
Saudi minister of defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence
committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in
general and on bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) in particular."
There was a core of truth to this. The G.I.D. and U.S. services had had a
long, if uneasy, understanding on sharing intelligence. Other Saudi claims
were far more startling.
Bandar had hinted right after 9/11 that both the U.S. and Saudi intelligence
services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were
publicly admitting. In 2007, however, by which time he had risen to become
national-security adviser to former crown prince—now king—Abdullah, Bandar
produced a bombshell. "Saudi security," he asserted, "had been actively
following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision. . . . If
U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious
and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened."
Though there was no official U.S. reaction to that claim, Michael Scheuer,
the former chief of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, later dismissed it in his
book Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq as a "fabrication."
Prince Turki had long since come out with an allegation similar to Bandar's,
but far more specific. He said that in late 1999 and early 2000—just before
the first two future 9/11 hijackers reached the United States—his staff had
informed the C.I.A. that both men were terrorists. "What we told them," he
said, "was these people were on our watch list from previous activities of
al-Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle
arms into the Kingdom in 1997."
C.I.A. spokesman Bill Harlow dismissed Turki's claim as being supported by
"not a shred of evidence." Harlow said information on the two
hijackers-to-be had been passed on only a month after the attacks. What the
9/11 commission thought of Turki's assertion has not been made public. The
National Archives told the authors that it was not permissible even to say
whether commission files contain a record of an interview with the former
head of the G.I.D. Information on the intelligence background to 9/11
apparently remains highly sensitive.
The Hijackers' Helpers
Saudi Arabia long remained a black hole for American official investigators
probing 9/11. They were not, for example, allowed access to the families of
those believed to have carried out the attacks. "We're getting zero
cooperation," former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro said
a month after the attacks.
Within the United States, however, the probe proceeded intensively and over
several years. And some of the most significant information gleaned, it
turned out, concerned the same two terrorists to whom Prince Turki had
alluded. They are said to have been handpicked by Osama bin Laden to be
first to enter the United States, and they would eventually be part of the
group that seized American Airlines flight 77, the plane used in the strike
against the Pentagon.
They were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both Saudis, both
experienced jihadis—holy warriors—though still in their mid-20s. They
entered the country through Los Angeles International Airport as early as
January 15, 2000, with scant knowledge of the English language and zero
experience of life in the West. The 9/11-commission report declared it
"unlikely" that the pair "would have come to the United States without
arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in
advance of their arrival."
The investigation identified individuals who helped or may have helped
Mihdhar and Hazmi following their arrival in California—whether by
happenstance or because of foreknowledge.
An imam named Fahad al-Thumairy, an accredited diplomat appointed by the
Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs to liaise with the huge nearby mosque,
served at the time at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. According to one
witness, Thumairy had at the relevant time arranged for two men—whom the
witness first identified from photographs as having been the two
terrorists—to be given a tour of the area by car.
A fellow Saudi, a San Diego resident named Omar al-Bayoumi, said by
individuals interviewed to have had frequent contact with Thumairy,
acknowledged that he met Mihdhar and Hazmi during a visit to Los Angeles on
February 1, two weeks after their arrival.
According to a person interviewed by the F.B.I., Bayoumi said before the
trip that he was going to "pick up visitors." What is agreed by all is that
he made the journey by car, accompanied by an American Muslim named Caysan
bin Don. On the way, bin Don said, Bayoumi mentioned that he was accustomed
to going to the consulate to obtain religious materials. They did stop at
the consulate, where, according to bin Don, a man in a Western business
suit, with a full beard, greeted Bayoumi and took him off to talk in an
office. Bayoumi emerged some time later, carrying a box of Korans. He would
describe the encounter differently, saying he was "uncertain" with whom he
had met and "didn't really know people in [the Saudi ministry of] Islamic
Affairs."
Both men agreed, however, that they proceeded to a restaurant and while
there—this is the crucial moment in their story—met and talked with future
hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, who had just arrived in the country. Bayoumi
and bin Don were to tell the F.B.I. the encounter occurred merely by chance.
Bayoumi urged Mihdhar and Hazmi to come south to San Diego, assisted them in
finding accommodations, and stayed in touch. On the day the two terrorists
moved into the apartment they first used, next door to Bayoumi's, there were
four calls between his phone and that of the local imam, New Mexico-born
Anwar Aulaqi—later to be characterized in the congressional report on 9/11
as having served as "spiritual adviser" to Mihdhar and Hazmi.
Bayoumi's income, which was paid by Ercan, a subsidiary of a contractor for
the Saudi Civil Aviation Administration—though, according to a fellow
employee, he did no known work—reportedly increased hugely following the
future hijackers' arrival. Another Saudi living in San Diego, Osama Basnan,
was also of interest to 9/11 investigators probing the money flow.
A three-page section of Congress's Joint Inquiry report (the product of
joint hearings on the 9/11 attacks by the House and Senate intelligence
committees), containing more lines withheld than released, tells us only
that Basnan was a close associate of Bayoumi in San Diego. According to
former U.S. senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the inquiry, and to press
reports, regular checks flowed in 2000 from Basnan to Bayoumi's wife. The
payments, ostensibly made to help cover medical treatment, had originated
with the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
There are separate reasons to question the activity of Thumairy, Bayoumi,
and Basnan. Thumairy, who had a reputation as a fundamentalist, was later
refused re-entry into the United States—well after 9/11—on the ground that
he "might be connected with terrorist activity." Bayoumi had first attracted
the interest of the F.B.I. years earlier, and the bureau later learned he
had "connections to terrorist elements." He left the country two months
before the attacks.
As for Basnan, his name had come up in a counterterrorism inquiry a decade
earlier. He had reportedly hosted a party for Omar Abdel Rahman—today
notorious as the "Blind Sheikh," serving life for his part in plotting to
blow up the World Trade Center and other New York City landmarks in
1993—when he visited the United States, and had once claimed he did more for
Islam than Bayoumi ever did. A partially censored commission document
suggests that—after Mihdhar, Hazmi, and fellow future 9/11 terrorists
arrived in the United States to learn to fly—a Basnan associate was in
e-mail and phone contact with accused key 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh.
A year after 9/11, Basnan was arrested for visa fraud and deported.
Available information suggests that two of the trio were employed by or had
links to the Saudi regime—Thumairy through his accreditation by the Ministry
of Islamic Affairs and Bayoumi through his employment by the company linked
to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. At least five people told the F.B.I.
they considered Bayoumi to be some sort of government agent. The C.I.A., Bob
Graham has said, thought Basnan was also an agent. Graham also cited an
agency memo that referred to "incontrovertible evidence" of support for the
terrorists within the Saudi government.
Problematic Interviews
In 2003 and 2004, but only following a high-level request from the White
House, 9/11-commission staff were able to make two visits to Saudi Arabia to
interview Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan.
The questioners, a recently released commission memo notes, believed
Thumairy "was deceptive during both interviews. . . . His answers were
either inconsistent or at times in direct conflict with information we have
from other sources." Most significantly, he denied knowing Bayoumi, let
alone Mihdhar and Hazmi. Shown a photograph of Bayoumi, he did not budge. He
knew no one of that name, he said. Then, prompted by a whispered
interjection from one of the Saudi officials present, he said he had heard
of Bayoumi—but only from 9/11 news coverage.
At a second interview, told by commission staff that witnesses had spoken of
seeing him with Bayoumi, Thumairy said perhaps they had taken someone else
for him. Told that telephone records showed numerous calls between his
phones and Bayoumi's phones, just before the arrival of Mihdhar and Hazmi in
the United States, Thumairy was stumped. Perhaps, he ventured, his phone
number had been assigned to somebody else after he had it? Perhaps the calls
had been made by someone else using Bayoumi's phone? Everything Thumairy
came up with, his questioners noted, was "implausible."
Bayoumi, interviewed earlier, made a more favorable impression. He stuck to
his story about having met Mihdhar and Hazmi by chance. He said that he had
rarely seen them after they came to San Diego, that they had been his
neighbors for only a few days. Bayoumi said he had then decided he did not
want to have much to do with them. Philip Zelikow, who was present during
the interview, did not think Bayoumi had been a Saudi agent.
The commission report, however, was to note that Bayoumi's passport
contained a distinguishing mark that may be acquired by "especially devout
Muslims"—or be associated with "adherence to al-Qaeda." Investigators had
also turned up something else. Bayoumi's salary had been approved by a Saudi
official whose son's photograph was later found on a computer disk in
Pakistan that also contained photographs of three of the hijackers. The son,
Saud al-Rashid, was produced for an interview in Saudi Arabia. He admitted
having been in Afghanistan and having "cleansed" his passport of the
evidence that he had traveled there. He said, though, that he had known
nothing of the 9/11 plot. Commission staff who questioned Rashid thought he
had been "deceptive."
Finally, there was Basnan. The commission's interview with him, Dietrich
Snell wrote afterward, established only "the witness' utter lack of
credibility on virtually every material subject." His demeanor "engendered a
combination of confrontation, evasiveness, and speechmaking … his
repudiation of statements made by him on prior occasions," and the "inherent
incredibility of many of his assertions when viewed in light of the totality
of the available evidence."
Two men did not face questioning by commission investigators. One of them, a
Saudi religious official named Saleh al-Hussayen, certainly should have,
although his name does not appear in the commission report. Hussayen, who
was involved in the administration of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina,
had been in the States for some three weeks before 9/11. For four days
before the attacks, he had stayed at a hotel in Virginia.
Then, on September 10, he had made an unexplained move. With his wife, he
checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia—the hotel at
which 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi were spending their last night alive.
Commission memos state that F.B.I. agents arrived at Hussayen's room at the
Marriott after midnight on the 11th. The Saudi official began "muttering and
drooping his head," sweating and drooling. Then he fell out of his chair and
appeared to lose consciousness for a few moments. Paramedics summoned to the
room were puzzled. Could the patient be "faking"?, they asked the agents.
Doctors who examined Hussayen at a local hospital, moreover, found nothing
wrong with him. An F.B.I. agent said later that the interview had been cut
short because—the agent suggested—Hussayen "feigned a seizure."
Asked by an F.B.I. agent why they had moved to the Marriott, Hussayen's wife
said it was because they had wanted a room with a kitchenette. There was no
sign, however, that the kitchenette in the room had been used. Asked whether
she thought her husband could have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in any
way, she replied, "I don't know." Agents never did obtain an adequate
interview with Saleh al-Hussayen. Instead of continuing with his tour of the
United States, he flew back to Saudi Arabia—and went on to head the
administration of the two holy mosques. It remains unknown whether he had
contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of 9/11, or whether his presence
at the Marriott that night was, as Bayoumi claimed of his meeting with the
two terrorists, just a matter of chance.
As Hussayen left Virginia for home, other F.B.I. agents in the state were
interviewing former San Diego-area imam Anwar Aulaqi. He did not deny having
had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi in California and later—with Hazmi—in
Virginia. He could not deny that he had transferred from San Diego to the
East Coast in a time frame that paralleled theirs. He made nothing of it,
however, and U.S. authorities apparently pursued the matter no further.
Aulaqi had reportedly preached in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol shortly
before 9/11. Not long afterward, he lunched at the Pentagon—in an area
undamaged by the strike in which his acquaintances Mihdhar and Hazmi had
played such a leading role. The reason for the lunch? An outreach effort to
ease tensions between Muslim Americans and non-Muslims.
Though American-born, Aulaqi is the son of a former minister of agriculture
in Yemen. He remained on and off in the United States after 9/11, apparently
unimpeded, before departing first for Britain and eventually for Yemen.
Suspicion that he may have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot is fueled by
the fact that the phone number of his Virginia mosque turned up among items
found in an apartment used by accused conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh, who now
languishes in Guantánamo.
Only seven years later, starting in 2009, did Aulaqi begin to gain world
notoriety. His name has been associated with: the multiple shootings by a
U.S. Army major at Fort Hood, the almost successful attempt to explode a
bomb on an airliner en route to Detroit, the major car-bomb scare in Times
Square, and the last-minute discovery of concealed explosives aboard cargo
planes destined for the United States.
When Aulaqi's name began to feature in the Western press, Yemen's foreign
minister cautioned that, pending real evidence, he should be considered not
a terrorist but a preacher. President Obama took a different view. By early
2010 he had authorized the C.I.A. and the U.S. military to seek out,
capture, or kill the Yemeni—assigning Aulaqi essentially the same status as
that assigned at the time to Osama bin Laden. Aulaqi remains, as Zelikow
noted when his name finally hit the headlines, "a 9/11 loose end."
Taken together, the roles and activities of Thumairy, Bayoumi, Basnan,
Hussayen, and Aulaqi—and the dubious accounts some of them have given of
themselves—heightened suspicion that the perpetrators of 9/11 had support
and sponsorship from backers never clearly identified.
Trouble on the Home Front
Congress's Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had
found evidence "that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the
hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to
most if not all of the hijackers. . . . It's my opinion that 9/11 could not
have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within
the United States. By 'the Saudis,' I mean the Saudi government and
individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the
government—which includes all of the elite in the country."
Those involved, in Graham's view, "included the royal family" and "some
groups that were close to the royal family." Was it credible that members of
the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation?
"I think," the former senator said, "that they did in fact take actions that
were complicit with the hijackers."
At page 396 of the Joint Inquiry's report, in the final section of the body
of the report, a yawning gap appears. All 28 pages of Part Four, entitled
"Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National
Security Matters," have been redacted. The pages are there, but—with the
rare exception of an occasional surviving word or fragmentary, meaningless
clause—they are entirely blank. The decision to censor that entire section
caused a furor in 2003.
Inquiries established that, while the withholdings were technically the
responsibility of the C.I.A., the agency would not have obstructed release
of most of the pages. The order that they must remain secret had come from
President Bush.
Bob Graham and his Republican co-chairman, former senator Richard Shelby,
felt strongly that the bulk of the withheld material could and should have
been made public. So did Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat
in the House. Shelby said, "My judgment is that 95 percent of that
information should be declassified, become uncensored, so the American
people would know."
Know what? "I can't tell you what's in those pages," the Joint Inquiry's
staff director, Eleanor Hill, said. "I can tell you that the chapter deals
with information that our committee found in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. files
that was very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for
the hijackers." The focus of the material, leaks to the press soon
established, had been Saudi Arabia.
There were, sources said, additional details about Bayoumi, who had helped
Mihdhar and Hazmi in California, and about his associate Basnan. The
censored portion of the report had stated that Anwar Aulaqi, the San Diego
imam, had been a "central figure" in a support network for the future
hijackers.
A U.S. official who had read the censored section told the Los Angeles Times
that it described "very direct, very specific links" with Saudi officials,
links that "cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental." The
New York Times journalist Philip Shenon has written that Senator Graham and
his investigators became "convinced that a number of sympathetic Saudi
officials, possibly within the sprawling Islamic Affairs Ministry, had known
that al-Qaeda terrorists were entering the United States beginning in 2000
in preparation for some sort of attack. Graham believed the Saudi officials
had directed spies operating in the United States to assist them."
Most serious of all, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reported that the
information uncovered by the investigation had drawn "apparent connections
between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers." Absent
release of the censored pages, one can only surmise what the connections may
have been.
There may be a clue, however, in the first corroboration—arising from the
authors' interview with a former C.I.A. officer—of an allegation relating to
the capture in Pakistan, while the Joint Inquiry was at work, of senior bin
Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. Many months of interrogation followed, including,
from about June or July 2002, no fewer than 83 sessions of waterboarding.
Zubaydah was the first al-Qaeda prisoner on whom that controversial
"enhanced technique" was used.
John Kiriakou, then a C.I.A. operative serving in Pakistan, had played a
leading part in the operation that led to the capture of Zubaydah—gravely
wounded—in late March that year. Back in Washington early that fall,
Kiriakou informed the authors, he was told by colleagues that cables on the
interrogation reported that Zubaydah had come up with the names of several
Saudi princes. He "raised their names in sort of a mocking fashion,
[indicating] he had the support of the Saudi government." The C.I.A.
followed up by running name traces, Kiriakou said.
Zubaydah had named three princes, but by late July all three had died—within
a week of one another. First to go was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, the leading
figure in the international horse-racing community who was mentioned
earlier, in our account of Saudis hastening to get out of the United States
after 9/11. Ahmed, a nephew of both King Fahd's and Prince Sultan's, died of
a heart attack following abdominal surgery at the age of 43, according to
the Saudis.
Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, also a nephew of
King Fahd's and Prince Sultan's, reportedly died in a car accident. A third
prince, Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, whose father was a cousin of
Fahd's and Sultan's, was said to have died "of thirst."
Former C.I.A. officer Kiriakou later said his colleagues had told him they
believed that what Zubaydah had told them about the princes was true. "We
had known for years," he told the authors, "that Saudi royals—I should say
elements of the royal family—were funding al-Qaeda."
In 2003, during the brouhaha about the redacted chapter in the Joint Inquiry
report, Crown Prince Abdullah's spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, made a cryptic
comment that has never been further explained. The Saudi regime's own probe,
he said, had uncovered "wrongdoing by some." He noted, though, that the
royal family had thousands of members, and insisted that the regime itself
had no connection to the 9/11 plot.
More than 40 U.S. senators clamored for the release of the censored section
of the report. They included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Sam
Brownback, Olympia Snowe, and Pat Roberts.
Nothing happened.
Bob Graham, with his long experience in the field as a member and chair not
only of the Joint Inquiry but also of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, has continued to voice his anger over the censorship even in
retirement. President Bush, he wrote in his book Intelligence Matters in
2004, had "engaged in a cover-up . . . to protect not only the agencies that
failed but also America's relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. . .
. He has done so by misclassifying information on national security data.
While the information may be embarrassing or politically damaging, its
revelation would not damage national security." Richard Shelby concluded
independently that virtually all the censored pages were "being kept secret
for reasons other than national security."
"It was," Graham wrote, "as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi
Arabia than with America's safety." In Graham's view, Bush's role in
suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other
transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office.
Within weeks of his inauguration, in 2009, Bush's successor, Barack Obama,
made a point of receiving relatives of those bereaved on 9/11. The widow of
one of those who died at the World Trade Center, Kristen Breitweiser, has
said that she brought the new president's attention to the infamous censored
section of the Joint Inquiry report. Obama told her, she said afterward,
that he was willing to get the suppressed material released. Two years
later, the chapter remains classified—and the White House will not say why.
"If the 28 pages were to be made public," said one of the officials who was
privy to them before President Bush ordered their removal, "I have no
question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change
overnight."
Blame It on Iraq
The 9/11-commission report certainly blurred the truth about the Saudi role.
By the time it was published, in July 2004, more than a year had passed
since the invasion of Iraq, a country that—the report said—had nothing to do
with 9/11.
In the 18 months before the invasion, however, the Bush administration had
persistently seeded the notion that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11.
While never alleging a direct Iraqi role, President Bush had linked Saddam
Hussein's name to that of Osama bin Laden. Vice President Cheney had gone
further, suggesting repeatedly that there had been Iraqi involvement in the
attacks.
Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq's supposed involvement affected
the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving
retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent
of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four
percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression
that "most" or "some" of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were.
In the wake of the invasion, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of
Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally
involved in 9/11.
None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved
out. "We went back 10 years," said Michael Scheuer, who looked into the
matter at the request of director Tenet. "We examined about 20,000
documents, probably something along the lines of 75,000 pages of
information, and there was no connection between [al-Qaeda] and Saddam."
What About Pakistan?
In the years during which the conflict in Iraq had the world's attention,
the real evidence that linked other nations to Osama bin Laden and 9/11
faded from the public consciousness. This was in part the fault of the 9/11
commission, which failed to highlight and fully detail the evidence. It was,
ironically, a former deputy homeland-security adviser to President Bush,
Richard Falkenrath, who loudly expressed that uncomfortable truth. The
commission's report, Falkenrath wrote, had produced only superficial
coverage of the fact that al-Qaeda was "led and financed largely by Saudis,
with extensive support from Pakistani intelligence."
Pakistan has a strong Islamic-fundamentalist movement. It was, with Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one of only three nations that
recognized the Taliban. Osama bin Laden had operated there as early as 1979,
with the blessing of Saudi intelligence, in the first phase of the struggle
to oust the Soviets from neighboring Afghanistan. The contacts he made were
durable.
What bin Laden himself had said about Pakistan two years before 9/11 seemed
to speak volumes. "Pakistani people have great love for Islam," he observed
in 1998 after the late-summer U.S. missile attack on his camps, in which
seven Pakistanis were killed. "And they always have offered sacrifices for
the cause of religion." Later, in another interview, he explained how he
himself had managed to avoid the attack. "We found a sympathetic and
generous people in Pakistan … receive[d] information from our beloved ones
and helpers of jihad."
Pakistan sees Afghanistan as strategically crucial, not least on account of
an issue of which many members of the public in the West have minimal
knowledge or none at all. Pakistan and India have fought three wars in the
past half-century over Kashmir, a large, disputed territory over which each
nation has claims and which each partially controls, and where there is also
a homegrown insurgency. Having leverage over Afghanistan, given its
geographical position, enabled Pakistan to recruit Afghan and Arab
volunteers to join the Kashmir insurgency—and tie down a large part of the
Indian army.
The insurgents inserted into Kashmir have been by and large mujahideen,
committed to a cause they see as holy. Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who in
1989 headed the ISI—the Pakistani equivalent of the C.I.A.—himself saw the
conflict as jihad. Bin Laden, for his part, made common cause with Gul and,
in the years that followed, with like-minded figures in the ISI. Many ISI
recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. He would
still be saying, as late as 2000, "Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of
Kashmir, we support it."
So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter
Tomsen told the 9/11 commission, that the Taliban "actually were the junior
partners in an unholy alliance" of ISI, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it
grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence, and the
Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with cash.
The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive
political influence within Pakistan, so much so that some came to
characterize it as "the most influential body in Pakistan," a "shadow
government."
While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of
the 9/11 attacks, two days later Washington issued a blunt warning as it
prepared to retaliate against the bin Laden organization and its hosts in
Afghanistan. It was then—according to ISI director Mahmoud Ahmed, who was
visiting Washington at the time—that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard
Armitage said the U.S. would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" should it
fail to go along with American demands for assistance. (Armitage has denied
having used that extreme language.)
The former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad Robert Grenier recently
confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al-Qaeda did improve vastly
after 9/11. The arrests of three of the best-known top al-Qaeda
operatives—Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—were,
it seems, made by Pakistani intelligence agents and police, in some if not
all cases working in collaboration with the C.I.A.
From the time America routed al-Qaeda, however, incoming information
indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or was
aware of his location. ISI officials, Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 commission,
were "still visiting [bin Laden] as late as December 2001"—and continued to
know his location thereafter. In 2007, Kathleen McFarland, a former senior
Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden's presence in Pakistan as a
fact. "I'm convinced," military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010,
"that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it's impossible after all
this time to not know where he is."
Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, "We will kill bin
Laden. . . . That has to be our biggest national-security priority." In
office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden,
meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high priority.
Looking back, though, there was a trickle of fresh information that
suggested otherwise.
General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan,
was asked on Meet the Press in 2010 whether it was now less necessary to
capture bin Laden. "I think," he replied, "capturing or killing Osama bin
Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged
in counterterrorism around the world."
For those who doubted that bin Laden was still alive, late fall 2010 brought
two new bin Laden audio messages. There had been intercepts of al-Qaeda
communications, U.S. officials told The New York Times, indicating that he
still shaped strategy. Then, within weeks, CNN quoted a "senior NATO
official" as saying bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were
believed to be hiding not far from each other in northwestern Pakistan, and
not "in a cave." The same day, the New York Daily News cited a source with
"access to all reporting on bin Laden" as having spoken of two "sightings
considered credible" in recent years—even "a grainy photo of bin Laden
inside a truck."
The End of bin Laden
Then, at 11:35 p.m. on the night of Sunday, May 1, President Obama appeared
on television screens across the globe to say: "Tonight I can report to the
American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an
operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and a
terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men,
women, and children."
Killed he was, and in Pakistan. It looked to many as though Pakistan had
been knowingly harboring him. For the world's most wanted terrorist had been
living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in
not just any Pakistani city, but in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where
many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting
distance of the nation's most prestigious military academy, the equivalent
of America's West Point. The ISI also has a presence there.
Officials in Washington were scathingly critical when these facts became
public. The Pakistanis, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta reportedly told
lawmakers, had been either "involved or incompetent." The president's
counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, thought it "inconceivable" that bin
Laden had not had a "support system" in Abbottabad. On 60 Minutes, Obama
himself speculated "whether there might have been some people inside of
government, people outside of government [supporting bin Laden], and that's
something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani
government has to investigate."
Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources later revealed,
thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his
fellow terrorists. Unmentioned were facts about the link between Abbottabad
and al-Qaeda that former president Pervez Musharraf had made public in his
2006 memoir. Pakistan's 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another
very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj
al-Libbi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit
by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to
Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libbi used no less than three
safe houses—all in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not
expect to find a top terrorist hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track
record for being exactly that.
A week after the strike against bin Laden, the correspondent for The
Guardian in Islamabad reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush
struck a deal with Musharraf: should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan's
borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid. "There
was an agreement," a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, "that
if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The
Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us." Musharraf
has denied that such a deal was made. According to The Guardian, however, an
unnamed Pakistani official offered corroboration for the story. "As far as
our American friends are concerned," he said, "they have just implemented
the agreement."
We cannot yet know the full background to how the U.S. tracked down bin
Laden. We do have a better sense, a decade on, as to whether powerful
players in foreign nations had a hand in 9/11.
Keywords
Osama bin Laden,
Saudi Arabia,
9/11,
United States
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