With Friends Like These...
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By Laura Rozen
tompaine.com
Published: Aug 05 2003
[Laura Rozen writes on national security issues from Washington, D.C.]
If John le Carré had written the plot, it would be considered too outrageous, even as fiction. But the Congressional report into the 9/11 attacks released on July 24 tells a true story, heartbreaking and frustrating.
The report reveals, for example, how the FBI came tantalizingly close to rousting some of the infamous 19 hijackers, in particular two Saudis who lived for a time at an FBI informant's home in San Diego. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar drifted on -- and off -- the radar screens of the NSA, CIA and the FBI numerous times starting in 1999. But they were never arrested, because U.S. authorities made two fatal assumptions: that Saudi Arabia and its nationals could be presumed allies, and that a widely anticipated Al Qaeda strike on U.S. interests in summer 2001 would take place abroad.
Considering this, the fact that the Bush administration now refuses to declassify 28 pages of the report that allegedly discuss Saudi support to the 9/11 hijackers is frustrating, given how much the other 900 pages of the report already reveal about the astonishing links between key support figures for the 9/11 hijackers and Saudis -- some with official ties. The report strongly suggests that two figures in particular who served as key logistical support figures for the San Diego-based hijackers were likely Saudi agents.
What makes the 900-page report even more infuriating, however, is the knowledge that the Bush administration continues to cover up for its Saudi friends -- and for its own role in turning a willfully blind eye to Saudi support of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists -- in the exact manner that the report reveals contributed to the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks in the first place. Protecting the Saudis isn't the real goal of the clumsy attempted cover-up: hiding the U.S. government's blunders about Riyadh is.
As it turned out, of course, 15 of the 19 hijackers that day were Saudis. Time and again, the U.S. bureaucracy looked the other way when it came to the uncomfortable conclusion that Saudis were significant players in an Al Qaeda network determined to strike and kill as many Americans as it could. Until almost a year after 9/11, for instance, the State Department did not even require Saudis to come for an embassy interview in order to get a U.S. visa, in spite of the fact that Saudis played a key role in Al Qaeda attacks that had killed Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, in the Africa U.S. embassy bombings in 1998 and in the U.S.S. Cole bombing in October 2000.
The Saudi Support Men And The San Diego 9/11 Cell
Even without the missing 28 pages, the report weaves the following bizarre story. Omar al-Bayoumi, a support figure for the San Diego-based hijackers, drove from San Diego to Los Angeles in January 2000 to meet with a Saudi consular official specializing in Islamic and cultural affairs. (U.S. authorities revoked this official's diplomatic visa and deported him, because of suspected terror ties.) After the meeting al-Bayoumi then went to a Los Angeles restaurant, where he met the two future hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had flown into Los Angeles a few days before, after attending an Al Qaeda gathering in Malaysia. The CIA had been aware of al-Hazmi's presence at that meeting, and had gotten the Malaysian authorities to provide photographs of the attendants. The CIA also obtained a copy of al-Hazmi's passport, which revealed that he had a U.S. multi-entry visa. Despite this, the CIA failed to put al-Hazmi on any watch list, and al-Hazmi and al-Midhar flew into Los Angeles mere days after the Al Qaeda gathering using their own names. At the restaurant, al-Bayoumi invited the two to move to San Diego, where he paid for their first month's rent and security deposit on an apartment, and threw them a welcome party.
Al-Bayoumi introduced the hijackers to Osama Bassnan, another San Diego-based Saudi student. Last November, Newsweek reported that FBI officials discovered transfers of over $130,000 from an account belonging to Princess Haifa, the wife of the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, to the wives of Bassnan and al-Bayoumi. It now seems likely that some of that money was shared with the hijackers. (For her part, Princess Haifa has publicly professed shock that her charitable donations might have supported terrorism, and seems to have been an unwitting victim of the transaction.)
Law enforcement officials now suspect that al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan were Saudi intelligence agents. Al-Bayoumi told his San Diego neighbors he was a student, but was never registered at the university he said he attended. Officially unemployed, al-Bayoumi nevertheless had access to seemingly limitless funds. Indeed, the report reveals that in 1998 and 1999 Bayoumi was the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation -- he had received a package from the Middle East overflowing with wires -- but the case was dropped.
Al-Bayoumi and Bassnan's behavior after 9/11 has also provoked concern.
Bassnan reportedly cheered upon learning of the 9/11 attacks. Bassnan went to Houston in April 2002 to meet with a Saudi prince involved with intelligence matters who was part of the entourage of visiting Saudi Crown Prince Abdulla, according to Newsweek. There he reportedly accepted a suitcase of money.
Two months before the 9/11 attacks, al-Bayoumi left California, where he had lived since the mid-1990s, heading first for the United Kingdom, then for Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials questioned al-Bayoumi in Saudi Arabia this week, where he again denied knowing of the hijackers’ intentions in advance.
Double Standards
Former CIA operative Robert Baer, who has just published a book on the U.S.-Saudi relationship, Sleeping with the Devil, says there is only one conclusion to draw:
"Bayoumi should be in jail," Baer asserts. "He is much more connected to September 11th than Zacarias Moussaoui."
Baer points out that Bayoumi was a Saudi government employee working in civil aviation, which falls under the Saudi defense minister. "And so here is this guy," he goes on, "he's got Qaeda connections according to the FBI, he goes to meet two of the hijackers. He hooks them up with this cleric [at the Islamic Center of San Diego] and they then follow [the cleric] to Falls Church, Virginia." Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, a Saudi, arranged money transfers from the Gulf to the hijackers, Baer says, and Saudis were among the investors in a company employing members of the Germany-based 9/11 cell.
"If this was a Soviet espionage case in the '70s or '80s, our conclusion would be that this was a clear-cut case of Soviet-state backed espionage," he says.
Baer's experience as an intelligence officer tells him to focus on Saudi Arabia. "It's a classic operation where a government sets up front companies," he says. "How did Bassnan get on Princess Haifa's charity list? He didn't just show up and write her a letter. The Saudis check these people."
That's not to say Baer believes the Saudi government ordered 9/11. Rather, he thinks bin Laden sympathizers are embedded throughout the Saudi regime. "The Saudi royal family has just lost control of the country, and that is really what the story is," he says.
No one knows how high the blame goes, Baer says. And no one will, until there is an investigation, which can only be pursued with Saudi cooperation. "All we have now," Baer says, "is the White House denying it, and the Bush administration saying trust us. I am not inclined to."
Congressional Pressure
Nor, it would seem, is Jonathan M. Winer, the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state. "One core fact should by now no longer be in dispute," he told the Senate Government Affairs committee hearing on terrorist financing on July 28. "Saudi Arabia has been the most significant source of terrorist funds for Al Qaeda."
Nonetheless, the Bush administration last week rejected requests from Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), and the Saudi government itself to release the remaining 28 classified pages of the Congressional report. Senators from both sides of the aisle are threatening to override the decision.
The stonewalling even has Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) fuming. "It's one thing to say that information in the 9/11 report about the Saudis is classified for national security reasons," he says, "but it's quite another when you're talking about a list of charities. I think these guys are losing it."
The administration's secrecy goes to the very heart of the problem the Congressional report describes: a failure to share information that could point to potential terrorist threats. The report shows that, over and over, bureaucratic turf-consciousness and a lack of communication across -- and even within -- agencies contributed to the failure to prevent 9/11.
For instance, nobody told the FBI San Diego field office that the FBI was looking for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, even after the CIA finally did put the two on a watch list in August 2001. And one CIA official refused to tell a New York FBI agent that the Agency knew al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were already in the United States, or that they had flown into Los Angeles.
Particularly heartbreaking is testimony from the FBI agent who handled the informant from whom Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar rented a room in San Diego. Asked what would have happened if he had been asked to locate Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar, the FBI agent told the Congressional Joint Inquiry,
"It would have made a huge difference....We would have done everything.... We'd have immediately gone out to various assets who already work in the streets for us. We'd basically run the names by them and find out -- we'd locate them, I'm sure. I'm sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a few days."
Could 9/11 have been prevented? Yes, the report makes clear.
The tragic fact is, nobody told the FBI San Diego field office to look for the 9/11 sleeper agents who were under their very noses. And what's scarier, the administration's secretive behavior and its seeming eagerness to protect Saudi interests repeats the very pattern that the Congressional report describes with painful, 20/20 hindsight. |
