By Robbyn Swan and Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Saudi Arabian intelligence officials pushed the 9/11 Commission’s top staff to exonerate a key Saudi suspect, Omar al Bayoumi, who the FBI later concluded was a Saudi spy who provided significant support to the first two al Qaeda hijackers to enter the U.S.
That disclosure is contained in a long-withheld 9/11 Commission memorandum released to Florida Bulldog in late August by the National Archives.
The seven-page memo also revealed the cozy working relationship among participants in the Oct. 17, 2003 meeting, including 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow and at least two FBI agents, as well as members of the kingdom’s domestic intelligence agency, Mabahith.
“PZ [Zelikow] gave a brief description of the Commission’s work and it was agreed that the US and Saudi Arabian sides are working for mutual benefit,” the memo says.
The memo had previously been withheld from the public in its entirety on national security grounds. Under its regulations the National Archives does not comment on which agency or government department had requested classification.
The meeting was held at the Conference Palace in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Also in attendance were the commission’s Senior Counsel Dietrich Snell and FBI agents Tom Powers and Nael Sabha, both then serving as legal attachés. The names of at least two other participants are redacted.
The U.S. representatives had finished interviewing Bayoumi at 1:30 a.m. and went immediately into the session with the intelligence officials to hear the results of the Mabahith’s investigation of the 15 Saudi hijackers in the horrendous Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. The four other hijackers were nationals of the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Egypt.
The 9/11 Commission’s “Memorandum for the Record” of the meeting says it concluded with “an extended discussion of the current status of al-Bayoumi….The Mabahith would like to see him cleared.”
While the Saudis got no assurances about Bayoumi then, the 9/11 Commission Report published nine months later concluded, “Our investigators who have dealt directly with him and studied his background found him to be an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.”
A SAUDI COVER UP?
The tone for the Commission’s meeting with the Saudi intelligence officers had been set earlier in the evening when the Mabahith interrupted the interview with Bayoumi, who had denied any wrongdoing, to throw a multi-course dinner for their American guests. It was a collegiate affair, which Bayoumi did not attend.
Jodi Westbrook Flowers, co-lead counsel representing 9/11 victims and families in their long-running civil suit against the Kingdom, described the newly released document as evidence that “the narrative around those who sponsored and supported the 9/11 hijackers prior to the attacks has been intentionally manipulated and covered up for decades now.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that Bayoumi was acting to assist the hijackers,” Flowers said in an email to Florida Bulldog. “This documents the Saudis later acting to try to cover up these key facts.”
Exactly 24 years ago, nearly 3,000 people were killed and thousands injured when the suicide hijackers turned passenger jets into missiles and demolished the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and badly damaged the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked jetliner, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a Pennsylvania field without reaching its intended target in Washington after passengers fought back and stormed the cockpit.
FBI investigation and the work of Congress’s prior Joint Inquiry into 9/11 had focused the Commission’s interest on Saudi “student” Bayoumi. He had befriended 9/11 hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi when they arrived in the U.S. in early 2000 and provided the pair with substantial assistance – helping with their move to San Diego, opening a bank account and co-signing the lease on their apartment.
Bayoumi, the previous investigative effort revealed, had extensive contacts with Saudi government entities in the U.S. including at least three individuals at the embassy in Washington. He had received a salary as an employee of the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority, although he did no work. His income had reportedly increased substantially following the future hijackers’ arrival and dropped when they had left.
Other lines of inquiry indicated he might have received money originating from the bank account of the wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, and that acquaintances suspected he was a Saudi spy.
But now Saudi intelligence wanted the man cleared on the basis of one interview by Commission staff and before the 9/11 panel had even completed its work.
The Commission team was in Saudi Arabia only after high-level intercession by the White House. Commission chief Zelikow would later tell the author Philip Shenon that he had appealed directly to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice a month prior to the Commission’s travel to the Kingdom.
“I asked her to intercede directly with Prince Bandar [then the kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S.], in facilitating Saudi cooperation with the Commission’s upcoming investigative work in the Kingdom,” Zelikow said. “We intended to interrogate several Saudi citizens in person and we also needed other cooperation from their security and intelligence services. I asked her directly for that help and explained what we wanted. I believe she did contact Prince Bandar on our behalf and helped secure appropriate Saudi cooperation. I then met with Prince Bandar myself to go over what we would need.”
In the puzzle palace of Saudi-U.S. relations to gain the access they required, the Commission was forced to fall back on a favor from Ambassador Bandar – whose own possible financial links to one of Bayoumi’s associates was supposedly under scrutiny.
EARLY PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN
That level of cooperation would be a dramatic volte-face. In the days after 9/11, the Saudis’ Washington Embassy mounted a propaganda campaign to counter the perception that Saudi Arabia was in any way responsible. Even as U.S. investigators worked to unravel a plot that had seen 15 young Saudis, as the bulk of al Qaeda’s 19-man team of hijackers, unleash mayhem on the U.S. at the behest of their Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden, millions of dollars flowed to public relations firms to restore the country’s image as friend and ally.
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 conclusion that some 15 of the hijackers were Saudi, his spokesman said the terrorists had “probably” used stolen identities.
Bandar’s father, Defense Minister 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.
Another senior prince who had chimed in was Naif – who as head of the Interior Ministry controlled the powerful Mabahith. Years before, Prince Naif had been involved in the series of events that had culminated in a troublesome young Osama bin Laden leaving Saudi Arabia for good. By one account, Naif had authorized his departure in return for an undertaking that the young jihadist would not interfere in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia.
In December 2001, Naif would say he still did not believe 15 hijackers had been Saudis. Instead, Sultan and Naif pointed 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 Sept. 11 and who benefited from them…I think they [the Zionists] are behind these events.”
As for the investigation of the attacks, the Saudis had been less than helpful. “We’re getting zero cooperation,” former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro said a month after the strikes. 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.”
Three months after 9/11, a senior Bush administration official said the Saudis were prepared only to “dribble out a morsel of insignificant information one day at a time.” The Saudis only began to cooperate seriously in May 2003 when al Qaeda brought the terror threat home by bombing the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
In the atmosphere of the day, Director Zelikow’s entreaties to the White House were an essential ingredient in unblocking the Commission’s road to the Kingdom. Once in Saudi Arabia, though, officials from Prince Naif’s Mabahith attended Commission interviews.
A SECOND DECLASSIFIED 9/11 MEMO
Another long secret interview revealed how conflicted the Kingdom’s leaders remained even in October 2003. While in Riyadh, Zelikow and other Commission staff met with Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, a liberal reform-minded younger son of Saudi Arabia’s founder.
In the record of the that second meeting, also released to us in late August, Prince Talal – previously identified by the Commission only as “Saudi interview # 1” – characterized Saudi Arabia’s desire to fight radicalism since 9/11 as “strong”. Talal was unsure, however, whether the Saudi leadership understood the problems it faced.
Prince Talal explained that, for instance, “pro-U.S. efforts such as increasing oil production after the Sept. 11 attacks were played down because they would anger public opinion.” He also remarked that “if he speaks up for the United States publicly, his life is at risk.” The Prince’s views are not included in the Commission’s Final Report.
Neither Commission staff nor American investigators were allowed access to the suspects’ families. Instead, the Mabahith’s investigative work on the background of the 15 Saudi hijackers – shared with Zelikow and Snell in the late-night meeting after the Bayoumi interview – filtered into the Commission’s Report. It informs much of the detail on the men in a section of Chapter 7 entitled “Recruitment and Selection for 9/11.’’
Neither the Saudi Embassy nor Zelikow responded to Florida Bulldog requests to explain who at the meeting had “agreed that the U.S. and Saudi Arabian sides are working for mutual benefit” and what the mutual benefit was, nor to a similar request to comment on the Mabahith’s pressure for the Commission to swiftly exonerate Bayoumi. Snell said in an email that he did “not have sufficient memory of the events at issue to feel comfortable commenting.”
Even after the long night of work that had begun with the interview of Bayoumi the previous evening, Zelikow and Snell demurred when the Saudi intelligence men made it plain they would like to see the man cleared. “The Commission,” the memo records the two having said, “likely would not be in a position to issue statements of exoneration prior to the publication of its report…”
In May 2004, however, when the Commission made public its findings on Bayoumi, it came close to the exoneration Saudi intelligence had requested. “Bayoumi is a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” the Commission Report opined. “It is certainly possible he has dissembled about some aspects of his story, perhaps to counter suspicion. On the other hand, we have seen no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups. Our investigators who have dealt directly with him and studied his background find him to be an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.”
Prince Bandar, then still Saudi ambassador to Washington, was delighted. “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 for years.
‘ZELIKOW HAS ZERO CREDIBILITY’
Author Shenon would later report that Commission investigators who had probed the Saudi angle believed they had “explosive material” not only on Bayoumi but on unusual cash transfers from Prince Bandar’s wife to another Saudi linked to Bayoumi. Their work, they believed, demonstrated a close link between hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi and the Saudi government – and their draft findings for the Report reflected that.
Then, late one night, as last-minute changes to the Report were being made, Shenon wrote in his 2008 book “The Commission,” the investigators received alarming news. Senior Counsel Snell, their team leader, was at the office with Executive Director Zelikow, making major changes to their material and removing key elements.
The lead investigators, Michael Jacobson and Raj De, hurried to the office to confront Snell. 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.
For attorneys working on behalf of the survivors and their families, the documents released last week fit a pattern. “Evidence,” Plaintiffs’ attorney Jodi Flowers said in an email, “was simply omitted or never followed up on. As a result, the 911 Commission’s findings are of limited value.”
“Philip Zelikow has zero credibility,” said Twin Towers survivor Sharon Premoli. “The outcome of his show trip to the KSA was as intended, a dead end. Given ‘Bandar Bush’s’ close relationship with Saudi Arabia, both personal and business, I believe Prince Bandar prevailed upon President Bush to assure the KSA would never be implicated in the attacks.”
In a New York court in late August, meanwhile, U.S. District Judge George Daniels made a momentous decision for the families’ two-decade-long quest to hold the Kingdom to account for its putative role in aiding and abetting the attacks. Daniels found that there was “reasonable evidence as to the roles played by Bayoumi, Thumairy and KSA, in assisting the hijackers.”
It opens the possibility that the commission’s decision to absolve Bayoumi and the Kingdom will be left not to a government panel but to a court of law.
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