Prince Bandar, then still Saudi ambassador to Washington, expressed delight when the Commission Report was published. “The clear statements by this independent, bipartisan commission,” he declared, “have debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia.” Quotations from the Report favorable to Saudi Arabia were posted on the embassy’s website and remained there still in early 2011.
Foremost among the quotes Prince Bandar liked was a Commission finding that it had located “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al Qaeda. The full quote, which was not cited, was less satisfying.
“Saudi Arabia,” the same paragraph said, “has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding,” and—the Report noted—its conclusion “does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda … al Qaeda found fertile fund-raising ground in Saudi Arabia.”
Another major passage did not appear on the embassy site. “Saudi Arabia,” it read, “has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. At the level of high policy, Saudi Arabia’s leaders cooperated with American diplomatic initiatives … before 9/11. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s society was a place where al Qaeda raised money directly from individuals and through charities … the Ministry of Islamic Affairs … uses zakat [charitable giving, a central tenet of Islam] and government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world.… Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims.”
The long official friendship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Report said, could not be unconditional. The relationship had to be about more than oil, had to include—this in bold type—“a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred.”
For a very long time, there had been no such clear commitment on the part of the Saudis. 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 support for terrorism, corruption, and abuse of human rights. At the same time, he addressed a letter to Crown Prince Abdullah, calling for “a move towards democracy.” The Saudi royals, Khilewi said, responded by threatening his life. The U.S. government, however, offered little protection. FBI 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 earliest attempt to bring down the Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the [1993] World Trade Center bombing” when he was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Ramzi 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 funded Yousef and KSM during the initial plotting to destroy U.S. airliners. There was telephone traffic between Khalifa’s cell phone and an apartment the conspirators used.
When Khalifa eventually returned to Saudi Arabia in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, met with a limousine and a welcome home from a “high-ranking official.” A Philippines newspaper would report that it had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne, who “allegedly welcomed” Khalifa.
Information obtained by U.S. intelligence in that period, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has written, had been the very opposite of the 9/11 Commission’s verdict of “no evidence” that senior Saudi officials funded al Qaeda.
“Since 1994 or earlier,” Hersh noted, “the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family.… The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it. The intercepts had demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.…”
“ ’96 is the key year,” Hersh quoted an intelligence official as saying, “Bin Laden hooked up to all the bad guys—it’s like the Grand Alliance—and had a capability for conducting large-scale operations.” The Saudi regime, the official said, had “gone to the dark side.”
Going to the dark side, by more than one account, began with a deal. In June 1996, while in Paris for the biennial international weapons bazaar, a group of Saudi royals and financiers is said to have 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 domestic intelligence reportedly learned, it was decided that bin Laden was to be kept at bay by payment of huge sums in protection money. To the tune, one account had it, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Los Angeles Times was in 2004 to quote 9/11 Commission member Senator Bob Kerrey as saying that officials on the Commission believed Saudi officials had received assurances of safety in return for their generosity, even if there was no hard specific evidence.
In years to come, senior Saudi princes would deride reports of payoffs or simply write them out of the script of history. “It’s a lovely story,” Prince Bandar would say, “but that’s not true.” GID’s Turki, for his part, recalled exchanges with the Taliban about bin Laden in 1996 during which he asked them to “make sure he does not operate against the Kingdom or say anything against the Kingdom.” In 1998—and at the request of the United States—according to Turki, he made two unsuccessful secret visits to try to persuade the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.
Others say Turki actually traveled to Afghanistan in both 1996 and 1998. In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook 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.
Turki would deny after 9/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden—his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad—during the exchanges that led to the deal. Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999—well before it became an issue after 9/11.
Whatever the truth about Turki’s role, other Saudi royals may have been involved in a payoff. 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 deal was,” the former official said, “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, Interior Minister Naif and the minister of defense and aviation, Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged payments, according to Henderson’s source
s, had amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It had been “Saudi official money—not their own.”
Unlike other surviving monarchies, the Saudi royal family comprises a vast number of princes—modest estimates put their number at some seven thousand. All are hugely wealthy, though only a much smaller number have real clout. There were Saudi royals, some came to believe, whose relations with bin Laden extended to active friendship.
Four-star General Wayne Downing, who headed the task force that investigated the 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia, said he learned of princes who went to Afghanistan and fraternized with bin Laden. “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him—you know—live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconry … ride horses. And then be able to have the insider secret knowledge that, ‘Yes, we saw Osama, and we talked to him.’ ”
At the State Department, the director of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism concluded that the relationship with some royals went way beyond recreational pursuits. “We’ve got information about who’s backing bin Laden,” Dick Gannon was saying by 1998, “and in a lot of cases it goes back to the royal family. There are certain factions of the royal family who just don’t like us.”
In the years and months 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 had become CIA director during Bill Clinton’s second term, has vividly recalled an audience he was granted by the crown prince’s brother Prince Naif. Naif, who as interior minister 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.”
Vice President Al Gore, who saw Crown Prince Abdullah soon afterward, renewed an existing request for access to a captured al Qaeda terrorist, a man known to have information on al Qaeda funding. “The United States,” the 9/11 Commission was to note dourly, “never obtained this access.”
So it went, year after year. Robert Baer, a celebrated former CIA field officer in the Middle East, recalled that Prince Naif “never lifted a finger” to get to the bottom of the 1996 bomb that killed and injured U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia. Baer pointed out, too, that it was Naif—in 1999—who released from prison two Saudi clerics long associated with bin Laden’s cause.
Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to note that it had been told “the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden [name and information censored].” Words, perhaps, out of the mouth of Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.
“As one of the unit’s first actions,” Scheuer recalled in 2008, “we requested that the Saudis provide the CIA with basic information about bin Laden. That request remained unfulfilled.” The U.S. government, he bitterly recalled, “publicly supported a brutal, medieval Arab tyranny … and took no action against a government that helped ensure that bin Laden and al Qaeda remained beyond the reach of the United States.” To Scheuer, looking back, America’s supposed ally had in reality been simply a “foreign enemy.”
On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, FBI 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 an investigator 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 the Frenchman, 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.
The conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.
A YEAR AFTER 9/11, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki—the longtime head of GID—expounded at length on his service’s relationship with the CIA.
From around 1996, he said, “At the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al Qaeda with the CIA. 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.”
That the GID and U.S. services had a long if uneasy understanding on sharing intelligence is not at issue. A year after his initial comments, though, by which time he had become ambassador to London, Turki spoke out specifically about 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi.
In late 1999 and early 2000, he said—when Mihdhar and Hazmi were headed for the terrorist meeting in Malaysia—GID had told the CIA that both men were terrorists. “What we told them,” he said, “was these people were on our watchlist from previous activities of al Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle arms into the Kingdom in 1997.”
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, had hinted right after 9/11 that the intelligence services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were publicly admitting. Then, his remarks had gone virtually unnoticed.
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. He went much further than had Prince Turki on what—he claimed—GID had passed to the CIA.
“Saudi security,” Bandar said, 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.”
The same week, speaking not of 9/11 but of the 2005 London Underground train bombings that killed more than fifty people and injured some eight hundred, King Abdullah made astonishing remarks. “We have sent information before the terrorist attacks on Britain,” the king said, “but unfortunately no action was taken … it may have been able to avert the tragedy.”
Such claims might be rejected out of hand, were it not that they came from Saudis at the very top of the power structure. A British government spokesman publicly denied King Abdullah’s remarks, saying that information received from the Saudis had been “not relevant” to the London bombings and could not have been used to prevent the attacks. The comments about Mihdhar and Hazmi led to a mix of denial, rage—and in one case, a curious silence.
“There is not a shred of evidence,” the CIA’s Bill Harlow said of Turki’s 2003 claim, “that Saudi intelligence provided CIA any information about Mihdhar and Hazmi prior to September 11 as they have described.” Harlow said information on the two hijackers-to-be had been passed on only a month after the attacks.
Prince Turki stood by what he had said, while eventually acknowledging that it had not been he himself who had given the information to the Americans. The prince’s former chief analyst, Saeed Badeeb, said it was he who briefed U.S. officials—at one of their regular liaison meetings—warning that Mihdhar and Hazmi were members of al Qaeda.
There was no official reaction to the most stunning allegation of all, Prince Bandar’s claim that th
e GID had followed most of the future hijackers, that 9/11 could have been averted had U.S. intelligence responded adequately. The following year, the CIA’s earlier bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer dismissed the claim—in a book—as a “fabrication.” By failing to respond to it publicly, he wrote, U.S. officialdom had condoned the claim.
Though senior 9/11 Commission staff interviewed Prince Bandar, they did so well before he came out with his claim about the Saudis having followed most of the hijackers “with precision.” The record of what the prince told the Commission—even at that early stage—remains classified on grounds of “national security.”
As interesting, of course, would be to know what former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki told the Commission—if indeed he was interviewed. On finding no reference to any Turki contact in listings of Commission documents—even if only referred to as withheld—the authors sent an inquiry to the National Archives. The response was remarkable, one that the experienced archivist with whom we dealt said she had never had to send before.
“I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Prince Turki Memorandum for the Record,” the archivist wrote in early 2011. “I’m not allowed to be any clearer.… I can’t tell you, or I’m revealing more than I’m allowed to.… If we have an MFR for Prince Turki, it would also be withheld in full.”
Legal advice to the authors is that the umbrella nature of the withholding—under which the public is not allowed to know whether a document on a subject even exists—is rare. Information about the GID, and what really went on between the Saudi and U.S. intelligence services before 9/11, apparently remains highly sensitive.