The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [192]
returned to Saudi Arabia in early 1999, where [words withheld], he disclosed information about the East Africa bombings.
Al Mihdhar’s first trip to the Afghanistan training camps was in early 1996. [three lines withheld] In 1998, al Mihdhar traveled to Afghanistan and swore allegiance to Bin Laden.
Hazmi “disclosed information”? To whom—to the GID? That possibility aside, there is a clue in a 9/11 Commission staff report. Mihdhar and Hazmi and Hazmi’s brother “presented with their visa applications passports that contained an indicator of possible terrorist affiliation.”
Depending how one reads a footnote in the Commission Report, all fifteen Saudi hijackers were vulnerable due to the fact or likelihood that their passports “had been manipulated in a fraudulent manner” by al Qaeda. According to the author James Bamford, however, Mihdhar’s two passports “contained a secret coded indicator, placed there by the Saudi government [authors’ emphasis], warning of a possible terrorist affiliation.”
What then of the claims by Princes Turki and Bandar that the Saudis shared information on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the CIA? Two years after the attacks, the authors Joseph and Susan Trento suggested a mind-boggling possible answer to that question. They claimed that a former CIA officer, once based in Saudi Arabia, had told them, “We had been unable to penetrate al Qaeda. The Saudis claimed they had done it successfully. Both Hazmi and Mihdhar were Saudi agents.”
Citing not only that officer but other CIA and GID sources, the Trentos have written that Mihdhar and Hazmi—assumed at the time to be friendly double agents—went to the January meeting of terrorists in Kuala Lumpur “to spy on a meeting of top associates of al Qaeda associates.… The CIA/Saudi hope was that the Saudis would learn details of bin Laden’s future plans.”
As noted earlier, the CIA knew even before Mihdhar reached Kuala Lumpur that he had a multiple-entry visa for the United States—a fact it said it discovered when his passport was photographed en route to Malaysia.
The reason the CIA did not ask the State Department to watchlist Mihdhar and Hazmi, according to the Trento account, was that the men “were perceived as working for a friendly intelligence service”—the GID. In any case, the Trentos quote one of their sources as saying that CIA operations staff allowed names to go forward to the watchlist only with reluctance. “Many terrorists act as assets for our case officers,” the source said. “We do deal with bad guys and, like cops protect snitches, we protect ours … none of those guys is going to show up on the no-fly list.”
The reason the FBI was not told anything about Mihdhar and Hazmi, the Trentos quote a source as telling them, was “because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States.”
Then the kicker. According to the Trentos, Mihdhar and Hazmi had not been thoroughly vetted by either the CIA or the GID. “In fact they were triple agents—loyal to Osama bin Laden.” And so it was, months later, that catastrophe followed.
Is this mere disinformation? Early on in his career, Joe Trento worked for the columnist Jack Anderson, famous in his day for breaking big stories, often without naming his sources. He has also worked for CNN. The Trentos have long written on intelligence, and have repeated their claim about the handling of Mihdhar and Hazmi in another book, in a 2010 article, and in a conversation with the authors.
The scenario they paint, though, bumps up against known events and evidence. It seems likely that the Trentos’ intelligence sources fed them morsels of fact mixed in with deliberate disinformation—a common enough ploy. Their account, though, does prompt a much closer look at the interplay between the CIA and the Saudi GID.
The CIA’s own inspector general, reporting in 2005, found that its bin Laden station and “[name redacted]