• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the flights, said he had “no recollection” of having first cleared it with anyone more senior in the administration.

One flight especially queried—on the grounds that it had supposedly occurred before U.S. airspace opened—was the charter flight from Tampa, Florida, to Lexington, Kentucky, on the afternoon of September 13. Contrary to previous reporting, however, FAA and other records show that U.S. airspace had by the time of the plane’s takeoff opened not only to commercial flights but also to charters.

Prince Ahmed and his party would stay on in Kentucky until the weekend, when they left the country aboard a 727 so luxurious that it could accommodate only twenty-six passengers. By then, with the press in full cry over the news that most of the 9/11 hijackers had been Saudi nationals, all or most of the frightened Saudi elite were on their way home.

It may be that none of the flights carrying Saudis occurred contrary to the emergency closure of U.S. airspace. The FBI’s checks on those who boarded the charter flights, though, were less than thorough. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence, for example, that the names of any of some 144 people who departed on charters within days of the airspace reopening had been checked against the State Department’s watchlist. Nor were most of those leaving questioned by the FBI before departure.

The Bureau did speak—albeit, it seems, briefly—with almost all of the bin Laden relatives involved in the exodus, including one of Osama’s nephews, Omar Awadh bin Laden.

Omar had once shared an address in Falls Church, Virginia, with his brother Abdullah bin Laden. The Bureau had briefly investigated Abdullah in the late 1990s because of his role in running a suspect Saudi organization known to preach extreme Islamism. The investigation had been closed after he produced a Saudi diplomatic passport. Questioned after 9/11, his brother Omar said he had had no contact with his uncle Osama and knew none of the Arabs suspected of involvement in the attacks, and he was allowed to go on his way.

An FBI memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the investigation. “Although the FBI took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/01 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed,” the memo reads, “it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without FBI knowledge.”

It is a point on which the Bureau and the Saudi government seem to agree. Asked on CNN the same year whether he could say unequivocally that no one on the evacuation flights had been involved in 9/11, Saudi embassy information officer Nail al-Jubeir responded by saying he was sure of only two things, that “there is the existence of God, and then we will die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don’t know.”

This was not an answer likely to satisfy anyone in the United States.

EVEN AS THE SAUDI aristocracy fled homeward, the embassy was mounting a propaganda campaign to counter the perception that Saudi Arabia was in any way responsible for 9/11. Millions of dollars—more than $50 million over the next three years—were to flow to public relations firms to restore the country’s image as friend, ally, and Middle East peacemaker. Another firm was paid to get the Saudi message to members of Congress.

Ambassador Bandar got the Saudi line over on Larry King Live. “We feel what happened to the United States—the tragedy and the cowardly attack on the United States—was not against the United States at all. It’s really against all civilized people in the world.… Our role is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends.”

It had soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush administration wanted rapprochement. The President invited Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, pressed him to come