Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel, relations between Riyadh and Washington had very recently become unprecedentedly shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America’s apparent complacency over the plight of the Palestinians. In the 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. His nephew Bandar had been 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. As of September 7, it looked as though the situation had stabilized. Then came the shattering events of Tuesday the 11th.
In Riyadh, and within twenty-four hours, 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 real economic effects of the 9/11 calamity—a major financial crisis.
On the night of Wednesday the 12th, though, a CIA official phoned Ambassador Bandar with the news that fifteen 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.”
All over the country, royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and home. These were people used to being able to travel at will, if not aboard their own jet, then by chartered airplane. This was no normal time, however, and U.S. airspace was closed. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at that wholly un-Islamic venue, Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, had decamped within hours of the attacks to the Four Seasons. They felt “extremely concerned for their personal safety,” they explained to the local FBI field office, and bodyguards apparently deemed the Four Seasons more secure.
On the other side of the country, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden family. One of Osama’s brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called the 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 twenty bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.
In Lexington, Kentucky, the thoroughbred racing mecca of America, Prince Ahmed bin Salman—a nephew of King Fahd—had been attending the annual yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed began quickly to round up members of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his nephew Prince Sultan bin Fahd 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.
Prince Sultan was at first unable to charter a plane, because U.S. airspace was closed. On September 13, however, he and his group did succeed in getting to Kentucky. 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.”
In spite of the fact that it was known that fifteen of those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush did not hold the official representative of Saudi Arabia at arm’s length. He kept a scheduled appointment to receive Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men, who had known each other for years, reportedly greeted each other with a friendly embrace. They smoked cigars together on the Truman Balcony and conversed, looking relaxed, with Cheney and Rice.
Later that night, Bandar’s assistant rang the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the assistant said, in getting bin Laden “family members” on a flight 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.
The confluence of events—the White House meeting and the subsequent calls—would set off a firestorm of criticism when it became known. A photograph of Bush’s September 13 meeting on the balcony with Prince Bandar was published in a 2006 book by Bob Woodward. When the authors asked for a copy of the photograph before publication of this book, however, the George W. Bush presidential library responded that the former President’s office was “not inclined to release the image from the balcony at this time.”
Had Ambassador Bandar used his influence and connections to whisk Saudi citizens—some of whom had links to Osama bin Laden himself—out of the country? There was speculation, too, that some Saudis were allowed to fly before U.S. airspace reopened, perhaps on the authority of President Bush. Had they, others asked, all been properly investigated before departure?
Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the flights, said he had “no recollection” of having first cleared it with anyone more senior in the administration.
One flight especially queried—on the grounds that it had supposedly occurred before U.S. airspace opened—was the charter flight from Tampa, Florida, to Lexington, Kentucky, on the afternoon of September 13. Contrary to previous reporting, however, FAA and other records show that U.S. airspace had by the time of the plane’s takeoff opened not only to commercial flights but also to charters.
Prince Ahmed and his party would stay on in Kentucky until the weekend, when they left the country aboard a 727 so luxurious that it could accommodate only twenty-six passengers. By then, with the press in full cry over the news that most of the 9/11 hijackers had been Saudi nationals, all or most of the frightened Saudi elite were on their way home.
It may be that none of the flights carrying Saudis occurred contrary to the emergency closure of U.S. airspace. The FBI’s checks on those who boarded the charter flights, though, were less than thorough. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence, for example, that the names of any of some 144 people who departed on charters within days of the airspace reopening had been checked against the State Department’s watchlist. Nor were most of those leaving questioned by the FBI before departure.
The Bureau did speak—albeit, it seems, briefly—with almost all of the bin Laden relatives involved in the exodus, including one of Osama’s nephews, Omar Awadh bin Laden.
Omar had once shared an address in Falls Church, Virginia, with his brother Abdullah bin Laden. The Bureau had briefly investigated Abdullah in the late 1990s because of his role in running a suspect Saudi organization known to preach extreme Islamism. The investigation had been closed after he produced a Saudi diplomatic passport. Questioned after 9/11, his brother Omar said he had had no contact with his uncle Osama and knew none of the Arabs suspected of involvement in the attacks, and he was allowed to go on his way.
An FBI memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the investigation. “Although the FBI took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/01 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed,” the memo reads, “it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without FBI knowledge.”
It is a point on which the Bureau and the Saudi government seem to agree. Asked on CNN the same year whether he cou
ld 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.”
This was not an answer likely to satisfy anyone in the United States.
EVEN AS THE SAUDI aristocracy fled homeward, the embassy was mounting a propaganda campaign to counter the perception that Saudi Arabia was in any way responsible for 9/11. Millions of dollars—more than $50 million over the next three years—were to flow to public relations firms to restore the country’s image as friend, ally, and Middle East peacemaker. Another firm was paid to get the Saudi message to members of Congress.
Ambassador Bandar got the Saudi line over on Larry King Live. “We feel what happened to the United States—the tragedy and the cowardly attack on the United States—was not against the United States at all. It’s really against all civilized people in the world.… Our role is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends.”
It had soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush administration wanted rapprochement. The President invited Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, pressed him to come when he hesitated, and—when he accepted—welcomed him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Vice President Cheney was there, as were Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Rice, and First Lady Laura Bush. The Saudi foreign minister and Ambassador Bandar, with his wife, Princess Haifa, accompanied the crown prince.
9/11, it seems, barely came up during the discussions. The principal topic was the Saudi concern over Palestine, which had led to such tension the previous summer. Speaking with the press afterward, the President cut off one reporter when he started to raise the subject of the fifteen Saudi hijackers. “Yes, I—the Crown Prince has been very strong in condemning those who committed the murder of U.S. citizens,” Bush said. “We’re constantly working with him and his government on intelligence-sharing and cutting off money … the government has been acting, and I appreciate that very much.”
The President was being economical with the facts. Saudi spokesmen had from early on waxed equivocal as to whether any of the hijackers had even been Saudi nationals. Two days after Ambassador Bandar had been told of the CIA’s estimate that some fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, his spokesman said the terrorists had probably used stolen identities.
In Saudi Arabia, historian Hatoon al-Fassi has said, “most people were in denial” over the American claim that their compatriots had been responsible. “They thought that, ‘Here’s Americans and the CIA trying to fabricate …’ ” Senior officials encouraged that notion.
“There is no proof or evidence,” claimed Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, minister of Islamic affairs, “that Saudis carried out these attacks.” Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz 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, Interior Minister Naif—a half-brother to the crown prince—was saying he still did not believe fifteen hijackers had been Saudis.
Not until February 2002 was Naif to 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.”
Sultan and Naif were still not done, however. 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 they [the Zionists] are behind these events.”
As for cooperation over the investigation of 9/11, the Saudis had been less than helpful. “We’re getting zero cooperation,” former CIA counterterrorism chief Cannistraro said a month after the attacks. Requests for name checks and personal information on the hijackers and other suspects were turned down. “They knew that once we started asking for a few traces the list would grow,” a U.S. source said. “It’s better to shut it down right away.” American investigators were not allowed access to the suspects’ families.
Three months after 9/11, a senior Bush administration official was saying that the Saudis were prepared only to “dribble out a morsel of insignificant information one day at a time.” Contrary to what the President would imply after his meeting with the crown prince, moreover, the Saudis reportedly delayed or blocked attempts to track the sources of terrorist funding in their country. “It doesn’t look like they’re doing much,” former FBI assistant director Robert Kallstrom said in spring 2002, “and frankly it’s nothing new.”
AS FOR THE ATTACKS themselves, Saudi Arabia would long remain a black hole for U.S. investigators. Also confronting them, obstruction and obfuscation aside, was the vast cultural gulf and the language gap; pathetically few staff in any agency had fluent Arabic. What they did begin to accumulate, as they looked for a possible umbilical linking the largely Saudi hijacking team to forces in Saudi Arabia, were some fragmentary clues and some suspects.
The suspects were the men believed to have met with or helped Mihdhar and Hazmi when they first arrived in California—as outlined in an earlier chapter. The blur of witness accounts permits the following scenario:
The 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 at first identified from photographs as having been the two future terrorists—to be given a tour of the area by car. A fellow Saudi, a San Diego resident named Omar al-Bayoumi, who was said to have had frequent contact with Thumairy, stated—according to a person interviewed by the FBI—that he was going to Los Angeles “to pick up visitors.”
Bayoumi did make the trip north, accompanied by an American Muslim named Caysan bin Don. On the way there, 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—‘two fists length’ “—greeted Bayoumi and took him off to talk in an office for a while. Bayoumi emerged some time later, carrying a box of Qur’ans. Bayoumi described the encounter differently, said he was “uncertain” whom he met with and “didn’t really know people in Islamic Affairs.”
After that, the two men have said, they went to a restaurant and—this is the crucial moment in their story—met and talked with the two new arrivals, future hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi. Was the encounter really, as Bayoumi and bin Don were to tell the FBI, merely a chance encounter? The reported detail, that Bayoumi dropped a newspaper on the floor, bent to retrieve it, and then approached the two terrorists, may—with a bow to espionage cliché—indicate otherwise.
The rest requires no lengthy retelling. Bayoumi urged Mihdhar and Hazmi to come south to San Diego, assisted them in finding accommodations, and stayed in touch. On the day they moved into the apartment they first used, an apartment next door to Bayoumi, there were four calls between his phone and that of Anwar Aulaqi—the local imam, who was later to travel to Yemen, there to plot attack after attack on America.
There is another factor in this tangled tale, one that involves money flow—and yet another local Saudi. Bayoumi’s income, paid by a Saudi company—though he did no known work—reportedly increased hugely following the future hijackers’ arrival. Also on the money front, enter another Saudi named Osama Basnan. A three-page section of Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report, containing more lines withheld than released, tells us only that he was a close associate of Bayoumi in San Diego, who at one
point lived across the street from Mihdhar and Hazmi.
According to former U.S. senator Bob Graham, cochair of the joint investigation, and to press reports, regular checks paid to Basnan’s wife at some point began flowing from the Basnans to Bayoumi’s wife. The payments, ostensibly made to assist in paying for medical treatment, originated with the Saudi embassy in Washington.
Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan all have suspect backgrounds. Thumairy, who had a reputation as a fundamentalist, was to be refused reentry to the United States—well after 9/11—on the grounds that he “might be connected with terrorist activity.” Bayoumi had first attracted the interest of the FBI years earlier, and the Bureau later learned he had “connections to terrorist elements.” Bayoumi 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 Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman when he visited the United States, and had once claimed he did more for Islam than Bayoumi ever did. He is said to have celebrated 9/11 as a “wonderful, glorious day.” A partially censored Commission document suggests that—after Mihdhar and Hazmi and the hijacker pilots arrived in the United States to learn to fly—a Basnan associate was in email and phone contact with accused key conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. A year after 9/11, Basnan was arrested for visa fraud and deported.
Available information suggests two of the trio were employed by or had links to the Saudi regime—Thumairy through his accreditation to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Bayoumi through his employment by a company connected to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. Several people characterized Bayoumi as a Saudi government agent or spy. The CIA, former senator Graham has said, thought Basnan was also an agent. The senator cited an Agency memo referring to “incontrovertible evidence” of support for the terrorists within the Saudi government.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 44
