From the beginning of U.S. investigations into the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, the query of whether or not the Saudi authorities might need been concerned has hovered over the case.
The FBI, after probably the most in depth prison probe in its historical past, concluded {that a} low-level Saudi official who helped the primary two hijackers in California met them by probability and aided them unwittingly. The CIA stated it noticed no proof of a higher-level Saudi position. The bipartisan 9/11 fee adopted these findings. A small FBI group continued to dig into the query, turning up info that raised doubts about a few of these conclusions.
However now, 23 years after the assaults, new proof has emerged to recommend extra strongly than ever that no less than two Saudi officers intentionally assisted the primary Qaida hijackers after they arrived in the US in January 2000.
Whether or not the Saudis knew the lads have been terrorists stays unclear. However the brand new info reveals that each officers labored with Saudi and different spiritual figures who had ties to al-Qaida and different extremist teams.
A lot of the proof has been gathered in a long-running federal lawsuit in opposition to the Saudi authorities by survivors of the assaults and family members of those that died. That lawsuit has reached a essential second, with a choose in New York getting ready to rule on a Saudi movement to dismiss the case.
Already, although, info put ahead within the plaintiffs’ case — which incorporates movies, phone information and different paperwork that have been collected quickly after the assaults however have been by no means shared with key investigators — argues for a basic reassessment of the Saudi authorities’s doable involvement with the hijackers.
The court docket recordsdata additionally elevate questions on whether or not the FBI and CIA, which repeatedly dismissed the importance of Saudi hyperlinks to the hijackers, mishandled or intentionally downplayed proof of the dominion’s doable complicity within the assaults that killed 2,977 folks and injured hundreds extra.
“Why is that this info popping out now?” requested retired FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who pursued the Saudi connections for nearly 15 years. “We should always have had all of this three or 4 weeks after 9/11.”
Saudi officers have lengthy denied any involvement within the plot, emphasizing that they have been at battle with al-Qaida effectively earlier than 2001.
They’ve additionally leaned on earlier U.S. assessments, particularly the one-page abstract of a joint FBI-CIA report that was publicly launched by the Bush administration in 2005. That abstract stated there was no proof that “the Saudi Authorities or members of the Saudi royal household knowingly supplied assist” for the assaults.
Pages of the report that have been declassified in 2022 are extra essential of the Saudi position, describing in depth Saudi funding for Islamic charities linked to al-Qaida and the reluctance of senior Saudi officers to cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
The plaintiffs’ account nonetheless leaves important gaps within the story of how two identified al-Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, averted CIA surveillance abroad, flew into Los Angeles beneath their very own names after which — regardless of talking no English and ostensibly figuring out nobody — settled in Southern California to start out getting ready for the assaults.
Nonetheless, the lawsuit has uncovered layers of contradictions and deceit within the Saudi authorities’s portrayal of Omar al-Bayoumi, a middle-aged Saudi graduate scholar in San Diego who was the central determine within the hijackers’ assist community.
Nearly instantly after the 9/11 assaults, FBI brokers recognized Bayoumi as having helped the 2 younger Saudis hire an condo, arrange a checking account and handle different wants. Bayoumi, then 42, was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, in Birmingham, England, the place he had moved to proceed graduate research in enterprise. Scotland Yard terrorism investigators questioned him for per week in London as two FBI brokers monitored the periods.
Bayoumi dissembled from the beginning, newly launched transcripts of the interrogations present. He stated he barely remembered the 2 Qaida operatives, having met them by probability in a halal cafe within the Los Angeles suburb of Culver Metropolis, after he stopped on the Saudi Consulate to resume his passport. The proof reveals he really renewed his passport the day earlier than the encounter within the cafe, one in every of many indications that his assembly with the hijackers was deliberate.
After stress from Saudi diplomats, Bayoumi was freed by the British authorities with out being charged. U.S. officers didn’t attempt to have him extradited.
Two years later, in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi sat for interviews with the FBI and the 9/11 fee that have been overseen by Saudi intelligence officers. Once more, he insisted that he was simply being hospitable to the hijackers. He knew nothing of their plans, he stated, and was against violent jihad.
Gonzalez and different FBI brokers have been doubtful. Although Bayoumi was supposedly a scholar, he did nearly no finding out. He was way more lively in organising a Saudi-funded mosque in San Diego and spreading cash across the Muslim group. (The Saudi authorities paid him surreptitiously by an aviation-services firm in Houston.)
FBI officers in Washington accepted the Saudi depiction of Bayoumi as an amiable, considerably bumbling authorities accountant attempting to enhance his expertise, and as a religious however average Muslim — and never a spy. The lead agent on the FBI group that investigated him, Jacqueline Maguire, instructed the 9/11 fee that by “all indications,” Bayoumi’s reference to the hijackers had been the results of “a random encounter” on the cafe.
The 9/11 fee accepted that evaluation. The fee’s investigators famous Bayoumi’s “obliging and gregarious” method in interviews and known as him “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.” The panel discovered “no credible proof that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist teams.”
However in 2017, the FBI concluded that Bayoumi was, in actual fact, a Saudi spy — though it saved that discovering secret till 2022, after President Joe Biden ordered businesses to declassify extra paperwork from the 9/11 recordsdata.
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Precisely whom within the Saudi authorities Bayoumi was working for stays unclear. FBI stories describe him as a “cooptee,” or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence service, however say he reported to the dominion’s highly effective former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Attorneys for the Saudi authorities have continued to repeat Bayoumi’s earlier denials that he ever had “any task” for Saudi intelligence.)
One other layer of Bayoumi’s hidden identification has emerged from paperwork, videotapes and different supplies that have been seized from his residence and workplace on the time of his arrest in England. The plaintiffs had sought that info from the Justice Division for years however acquired nearly nothing till the British authorities started sharing their copies of the fabric in 2023.
Though Saudi officers insist that Bayoumi merely volunteered at an area mosque, the British proof factors to his deeper collaboration with the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The Saudi royals had established the ministry in 1993 as a part of a governing pact with the highly effective clergy. In return for political assist, they gave the clerics efficient management over home spiritual issues and funded their efforts to unfold their fundamentalist Wahhabi model of Islam abroad.
From the beginning of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, brokers pored over a brief excerpt of a videotape recorded at a celebration that Bayoumi hosted for some two dozen Muslim males in February 2000, quickly after Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego.
It was one other coincidence, Bayoumi claimed, that he held the occasion within the hijackers’ condo. The 2 younger Saudis had nothing actually to do with the gathering, he stated, however he wanted to maintain his spouse and different girls in his personal condo, sequestered from male company in response to conservative Muslim customized.
The FBI didn’t share a full copy of the VHS recording with both its personal discipline brokers or the 9/11 households, who sought it repeatedly. (An FBI spokesperson declined to touch upon the bureau’s dealing with of the Bayoumi proof.) However the full recording was supplied to the plaintiffs by the British police final December.
The longer model casts Bayoumi’s gathering in a special mild. Though the nominal visitor of honor is a visiting Saudi cleric, the 2 hijackers are fastidiously launched to the opposite company and are seemingly on the middle of the proceedings.
After figuring out most of the get together company for the primary time, the plaintiffs’ legal professionals have been capable of doc that many went on to play important roles within the hijackers’ assist community, serving to them arrange web and phone service, join English lessons and purchase a used automobile.
“Bayoumi hand-picked these people as a result of he knew and assessed that they have been well-suited to supply the Al Qaeda operatives with necessary types of assist,” the legal professionals wrote of the get together company.
One other videotape taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham house is much more at odds with the picture he conveyed to the FBI and the 9/11 fee. The video follows Bayoumi as he excursions Washington, D.C., with two visiting Saudi clerics early in the summertime of 1999.
Attorneys for the Saudi authorities known as the recording an harmless memento — “a vacationer video that features footage of paintings, flowerbeds, and a squirrel on the White Home garden.” However the plaintiffs’ legal professionals posit a extra ominous function, particularly as Bayoumi focuses on his predominant topic: an in depth presentation of the Capitol constructing, which is proven from a collection of vantage factors and in relation to different Washington landmarks.
“We greet you, the esteemed brothers, and we welcome you from Washington,” Bayoumi says on the video. Later, standing earlier than the digital camera, he stories as “Omar al-Bayoumi from Capitol Hill, the Capitol constructing.”
The footage reveals the Capitol from numerous angles, noting architectural options, entrances and the motion of safety guards. Bayoumi sprinkles his narration with spiritual language and refers to a “plan.”
“Bayoumi’s video footage and his narration should not that of a vacationer,” the plaintiffs contend in a single court docket doc, citing the evaluation of a former FBI skilled. The video, they add, “bears the hallmarks of terror planning operations recognized by regulation enforcement and counterterrorism investigators in operational movies seized from terror teams together with Al Qaeda.”
Attorneys for the Saudi authorities dismissed this conclusion as preposterous.
However the video’s timing is noteworthy. In response to the 9/11 fee report, Osama bin Laden and different al-Qaida leaders started discussing their “planes operation” within the spring of 1999. Though they disagreed on which U.S. landmarks to strike, the report states, “all of them needed to hit the Capitol.”
The 2 Saudi clerics who joined Bayoumi on the journey, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, have been so-called propagators — emissaries of the Islamic Affairs ministry despatched to proselytize overseas. U.S. investigators later linked them to a handful of Islamist militants.
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Most notably, Sudairy, whom Bayoumi describes because the emir, or chief, of the Washington journey, spent a number of months residing in Columbia, Missouri, with Ziyad Khaleel, a Palestinian-American al-Qaida member who delivered a satellite tv for pc cellphone to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. The Qaida chief used the cellphone to coordinate the lethal bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI officers have stated.
Sudairy and Sadhan, who had diplomatic standing, had beforehand visited California, working with Bayoumi and staying at a small San Diego guesthouse the place the hijackers later lived. Many new particulars of their travels have been revealed within the British paperwork. The 2 Saudis had beforehand denied even figuring out Bayoumi, one in every of many false claims in depositions coordinated by the Saudi authorities.
The brand new proof additionally reveals that Sadhan and Sudairy labored with the opposite key Saudi official linked to the hijackers, the cleric Fahad al-Thumairy. In response to one FBI supply, it was Thumairy, the 32-year-old imam of a distinguished Saudi mosque in Culver Metropolis, who acquired the hijackers after they arrived on Jan. 15, 2000, and organized for his or her short-term housing and different wants.
Thumairy, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs official who was additionally assigned to the Saudi consulate, insisted he had no reminiscence of Hazmi and Mihdhar, though the three have been seen collectively by a number of FBI informants. Thumairy additionally denied figuring out Bayoumi, regardless of phone information that present no less than 5 dozen calls between them. Thumairy’s diplomatic visa was withdrawn by the State Division in 2003 due to his suspected involvement with terrorist exercise.
In an in depth evaluation of phone information produced by the FBI and the British authorities, the plaintiffs additionally documented what they known as patterns of coordination involving Bayoumi, Thumairy and different Saudi officers. (Attorneys for the Saudi authorities stated the calls have been about mundane spiritual issues.)
Two weeks earlier than the hijackers’ arrival, for instance, the information present calls amongst Bayoumi, Thumairy and the Islamic Affairs director on the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bayoumi and Thumairy additionally made quite a few calls round that point to a famous Yemeni American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who later emerged as an necessary Qaida chief in Yemen.
It has lengthy been identified that Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, had some contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego and met two different 9/11 hijackers after shifting to a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. However many FBI investigators believed he was radicalized effectively after 9/11 and will not have identified the hijackers’ plans.
New proof filed within the court docket case factors to a extra important relationship. Awlaki seems to have met Hazmi and Mihdhar as quickly as they arrived in San Diego. He joined Bayoumi in serving to them hire an condo and arrange financial institution accounts, and he was seen by others to have served as a trusted religious advisor.
Awlaki’s worldview “matched fairly carefully to al-Qaida’s on the time,” stated Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a biographer of Awlaki who served as an skilled for the plaintiffs. “The brand new info now changing into public, on prime of what we already find out about his teachings and associations, makes it cheap to conclude that Awlaki knew the hijackers have been a part of the al-Qaeda community.”
