The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [188]
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, 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