The National Archives inspector general and others worried about what other documents Berger may have removed from the Archives. Short of a further admission on his part, the director of the Archives’ presidential documents staff conceded, we shall never know. Whatever he took, Farmer pointed out, it made him appear “desperate to prevent the public from seeing certain papers.”
“What information could be so embarrassing,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert asked, “that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation’s most sensitive secrets? … Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission?”
The question is all the more relevant when one notes that, so far as one can tell, Berger’s focus was on the period right after the CIA’s resolve to “penetrate” bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus, or “recruit” inside it, an aspiration followed in rapid order by the discovery of Khalid al-Mihdhar’s U.S. entry visa—and the highly suspect failure to share that information with the State Department and the FBI.
THOUGH FRAGMENTARY, there are pointers suggesting that the CIA did not promptly drop its coverage of Mihdhar. On January 5, 2000—the day of the discovery of Mihdhar’s visa, and in the same cable that claimed the FBI had been notified—desk officer “Michelle” noted that “we need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities.” As late as February, moreover, a CIA message noted that the Agency was still engaged in an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.”
Mihdhar was to tell KSM, according to the CIA account of KSM’s interrogation, that he and Hazmi “believed they were surveilled from Thailand to the U.S.” KSM seems to have taken this possibility seriously—sufficiently so, the CIA summary continues, that he “began having doubts whether the two would be able to fulfil their mission.” Later, in 2001, two other members of the hijack team sent word that they thought they, too, had been tailed on a journey within the United States.
The hijackers may have imagined they were being followed. Given their mission, it would have been a natural enough fear. There is another relevant lead, though, that has more substance.
In the early afternoon of September 11, the senior aide to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld penned a very curious handwritten note. Written by Deputy Under Secretary Stephen Cambone at 2:40 P.M., following a phone call between Rumsfeld and Tenet, it appears in a record of the day’s events that was obtained in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act.
The note reads:
AA 77—3 indiv have been followed since Millennium & Cole
1 guy is assoc of Cole bomber
3 entered US in early July
(2 of 3 pulled aside and interrogated?)
Though somewhat garbled, probably due to the rush of events in those hectic hours, the details more or less fit. Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Hazmi’s brother were hijackers aboard American Flight 77, the airliner that was flown into the Pentagon. Mihdhar had been an associate of USS Cole planner Attash, the most significant of the fellow terrorists with whom he met in Kuala Lumpur. Mihdhar, certainly, had entered the United States—for the second time, after months back in the Middle East—in “early July,” on July 4.
Cambone’s note on three individuals having “been followed” could be interpreted in two ways. Had Tenet meant during his conversation with Secretary Rumsfeld merely to convey the fact that three of the terrorists had at an earlier point come to the notice of the intelligence community? Or had he—conceivably—meant what the note says he said, that the terrorists’ movements had indeed been monitored?
Was it Tenet’s knowledge of some intelligence operation that had targeted Mihdhar and Hazmi—whether in the shape of monitoring them or attempting to recruit them—that led to the director’s flash of recognition and his “Oh, Jesus” exclamation on seeing their names on the Flight 77 manifest?
If an operation had been attempted, contrary to the rules that govern CIA activities, to whom was it entrusted? To try to answer that question is to fumble in the dark. There are pointers, though, in the evidence as to whether any foreign nation-state—other than Afghanistan, where the Taliban played host to bin Laden—had responsibility at any level for the 9/11 attacks.
THIRTY-TWO
AQUESTION THE 9/11 COMMISSION SOUGHT TO ANSWER, ITS CHAIRMEN Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, was “Had the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?”
“The terrorists do not function in a vacuum,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told reporters the week after 9/11. They “live and work and function and are fostered and financed and encouraged, if not just tolerated, by a series of countries.… 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 9/11 Commission would consider whether any of three foreign countries in particular might have had a role in 9/11. Two were self-avowed foes of the United States—Iran and Iraq. The third was the country long since billed—by both sides—as a close friend of the United States, Saudi Arabia.
The Commission stated that it had seen “no evidence 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. The Commission Report, however, said there was no evidence that Iran “was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.” The commissioners urged the government to investigate further.
There is nothing to indicate that federal agencies have probed further. In 2011, however, it was reported that a suit filed by lawyers for bereaved U.S. family members would include revealing 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.”
In December 2011, in a significant development, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs had “provided direct support to al Qaeda” for the 9/11 attacks. The case was continuing as this edition went to press.
Also significantly, there was no finding in the 9/11 Commission Report that categorically exonerated America’s “friend” Saudi Arabia—or individuals in Saudi Arabia—from any involvement in the 9/11 plot. The decision as to what to say about Saudi Arabia in the Report had been made amid discord and tension.
Investigators who had probed the Saudi angle believed their work demonstrated a close link between hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi and the Saudi government. Their written findings reflected that.
Then, late one night, as last-minute changes to the Report were being made, the investigators received alarming news. Senior counsel Snell, their team leader, was at the office, closeted with executive director Zelikow, making major changes to their material and removing key elements.
The lead 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 was to survive in the Report—but only in tiny print, hidden in the endnotes.
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 2012.
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 bin Abdul Aziz, 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 bin Abdul Aziz. 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.”
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.”
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 42