The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [190]
Vice President Al Gore, who saw Crown Prince Abdullah soon afterward, renewed an existing request for access to a captured al Qaeda terrorist, a man known to have information on al Qaeda funding. “The United States,” the 9/11 Commission was to note dourly, “never obtained this access.”
So it went, year after year. Robert Baer, a celebrated former CIA field officer in the Middle East, recalled that Prince Naif “never lifted a finger” to get to the bottom of the 1996 bomb that killed and injured U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia. Baer pointed out, too, that it was Naif—in 1999—who released from prison two Saudi clerics long associated with bin Laden’s cause.
Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to note that it had been told “the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden [name and information censored].” Words, perhaps, out of the mouth of Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.
“As one of the unit’s first actions,” Scheuer recalled in 2008, “we requested that the Saudis provide the CIA with basic information about bin Laden. That request remained unfulfilled.” The U.S. government, he bitterly recalled, “publicly supported a brutal, medieval Arab tyranny … and took no action against a government that helped ensure that bin Laden and al Qaeda remained beyond the reach of the United States.” To Scheuer, looking back, America’s supposed ally had in reality been simply a “foreign enemy.”
On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, FBI director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. “You’ve got to be kidding,” retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. “They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”
Several years later, in two long conversations with an investigator for a French intelligence agency, O’Neill was still venting his frustration. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” he said, “are in Saudi Arabia.”
The answers and the clues, however, remained out of reach. In part, O’Neill told the Frenchman, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil meant that Saudi Arabia had “much more leverage on us than we have on the Kingdom.” And, he added, because “high-ranking personalities and families in the Saudi Kingdom” had close ties to bin Laden.
The conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.
A YEAR AFTER 9/11, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki—the longtime head of GID—expounded at length on his service’s relationship with the CIA.
From around 1996, he said, “At the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al Qaeda with the CIA. And in 1997 the Saudi Minister of Defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in general and on bin Laden and al Qaeda in particular.”
That the GID and U.S. services had a long if uneasy understanding on sharing intelligence is not at issue. A year after his initial comments, though, by which time he had become ambassador to London, Turki spoke out specifically about 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi.
In late 1999 and early 2000, he said—when Mihdhar and Hazmi were headed for the terrorist meeting in Malaysia—GID had told the CIA that both men were terrorists. “What we told them,” he said, “was these people were on our watchlist from previous activities of al Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle arms into the Kingdom in 1997.”
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, had hinted right after 9/11 that the intelligence services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were publicly admitting. Then, his remarks had gone virtually