The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [119]
Major funding also came from others. Soon after his funding had officially been cut off, according to the DGSE report, $4.5 million went to bin Laden from “Islamic Non-Governmental Organizations” in the Gulf. Five years later, it was discovered that “at least $3,000,000” believed to be for bin Laden had been funneled through Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank. Those behind the payments, the CIA’s Cannistraro testified, had been “wealthy Saudis.” When the Commercial Bank connection was cut, they switched to “siphoning off funds from their worldwide enterprises in creative and imaginative ways.”
The former head of the DGSE’s Security Intelligence department, Alain Chouet, who had regular access to secret intelligence, has said that considerable evidence “points to a number of private donors in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as to a number of banks and charities with money pumped in from Saudi or Gulf funds.… What was expensive wasn’t the terrorist operations themselves but all that’s required for recruiting terrorists: financing the mosques, the clubs, the imams, the religious schools, the training camps, the maintenance of ‘martyrs’ ’ families.”
Funding for bin Laden’s operational needs—weapons, camps, living expenses, operatives’ travel—never dried up. As a 9/11 Commission report on terrorist financing noted, al Qaeda’s budget in the years before 9/11 amounted to $30 million a year. It was money raised almost entirely from donations, especially from “wealthy Saudi nationals.”
The DGSE’s Alain Chouet dismissed the revocation of bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship as merely a “subterfuge aimed at the gullible—designed to cover a continuing clandestine relationship.” For years to come at least—according to Chouet—the Saudi government covertly manipulated bin Laden to act in its strategic interests, as he once had in the Afghan war against the Soviets.
There is information, to be reported later in these pages, that the “wealthy Saudi nationals” who continued to fund bin Laden included members of the ruling royal family.
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BY EARLY 1996, when U.S. ambassador to Sudan Timothy Carney sat down for talks with Sudanese foreign minister Ali Taha, the bin Laden problem was on the agenda. Washington, which had recently condemned Sudan for its “sponsorship of terror,” claimed that bin Laden was directing and funding a number of terrorist organizations around the world.
Washington wanted Sudan to expel the troublesome exile. But to where? To the United States? What to do with him were he to be flown there? “We couldn’t indict him then,” President Clinton said after 9/11, “because he hadn’t killed anyone in America.” To Saudi Arabia? “We asked Saudi Arabia to take him,” Clinton recalled. “The Saudis didn’t want him back.… They were afraid it was too much of a hot potato.”
Wherever bin Laden was to go, the Clinton White House believed it would be worthwhile just to get him out of Sudan. “My calculation was, ‘It’s going to take him a while to reconstitute,’ ” then–National Security Council counterterrorism director Steven Simon has said, “and that screws him up and buys time.”
Following that line of thinking turned out to be a disastrous mis-judgment. Not to have acted decisively against bin Laden in 1996, President Clinton would say—in private—after 9/11, was “probably the biggest mistake of my presidency.” In Sudan, as former CIA station chief Milton Bearden has said, “perhaps we could have controlled or monitored him more closely, to see what he was doing.”
The United States did not do that. It sat idly by when, in May that year, bin Laden returned to the remote, tragically