Investigators for the 9/11 commission would
later describe the scene in Saudi Arabia as chilling.
They took seats in front of a former Saudi diplomat who, many on
the commission’s staff believed, had been a ringleader of a
Saudi government spy network inside the US that gave support to
at least two of the 9/11 hijackers in California in the year
before the 2001 attacks.
At first, the witness, 32-year-old Fahad al-Thumairy, dressed in
traditional white robes and headdress, answered the questions
calmly, his hands folded in front of him. But when the
interrogation became confrontational, he began to squirm,
literally, pushing himself back and forth in the chair, folding
and unfolding his arms, as he was pressed about his ties to two
Saudi hijackers who had lived in southern California before
9/11.
Even as he continued to deny any link to terrorists, Thumairy
became angry and began to sputter when confronted with evidence
of his 21 phone calls with another Saudi in the hijackers’
support network – a man Thumairy had once claimed to be a
stranger. “It was so clear Thumairy was lying,” a commission
staffer said later. “It was also so clear he was dangerous.”
An interrogation report prepared after the questioning of the
Saudi diplomat in February 2004 is among the most tantalizing of
a sheaf of newly declassified documents from the files of the
staff of the 9/11 commission. The files, which were quietly
released by the National Archives over the last 18 months and
have drawn little public scrutiny until now, offer a detailed
chronology of how the commission’s staff investigated
allegations of Saudi government involvement in 9/11, including
how the panel’s investigators flew to Saudi Arabia to go
face-to-face with some of the Saudis believed to have been part
of the hijackers’ support network on American soil.
The newly declassified documents may also help resolve the
lingering mystery about what is hidden in a long-classified
congressional report about ties between Saudi Arabia and the
9/11 attacks.
A former commission staff member said in an interview last week
that the material in the newly released files largely duplicates
information from “the 28 pages”, as they are commonly known in
Washington, and then goes well beyond it.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of angering his
former colleagues, he said he was annoyed that so much attention
has been focused on “the 28 pages” when, in fact, the commission
had full access to the congressional report and used it as a
roadmap to gather new evidence and witness accounts that
demonstrated sinister connections between low-level Saudi
government officials and a terrorist support network in southern
California.
“We had lots of new material,” the former staffer said. Another,
earlier memo from the commission’s files, unearthed last month
by the website 28pages.org, which is pressing for release of the
congressional report, lists the names of dozens of Saudis and
others who had come under suspicion for possible involvement
with the hijackers, including at least two Saudi naval officers.
The memo, dated June 2003, noted the concern of the staff that
earlier US investigations of the Saudi ties to terrorism had
been hindered by “political, economic or other considerations”.
Barack Obama has said he is nearing a decision on whether to
declassify the 28 pages, a move that has led to the first
serious public split among the 9/11 commissioners since they
issued a final report in 2004. The commission’s former chairman
and vice chairman have urged caution in releasing the
congressional report, suggesting it could do damage to US-Saudi
relations and smear innocent people, while several of the other
commissions have called for the 28 pages to be made public,
saying the report could reveal leads about the Saudis that still
need to be pursued.
Earlier this week, a Republican commissioner, former navy
secretary John F Lehman, said there was clear evidence that
Saudi government employees were part of a support network for
the 9/11 hijackers – an allegation, congressional officials have
confirmed, that is addressed in detail in the 28 pages.
In an interview Thursday, Lehman said that while he had not
meant to his comments to suggest any deep disagreements among
the 10 commissioners about their investigation, he stood by his
view – directly contradicting the commission’s chairman and
vice-chairman – that “there was an awful lot of participation by
Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those
people worked in the Saudi government”.
“The 9/11 investigation was terminated before all the relevant
leads were able to be investigated,” he said on Thursday. “I
believe these leads should be vigorously pursued. I further
believe that the relevant 28 pages from the congressional report
should be released, redacting only the names of individuals and
certain leads that have been proven false.”
For some of the families of 9/11 victims and others who have
been harshly critical of the investigation conducted by the 9/11
commission, the newly declassified paperwork from the
commission’s files and the renewed debate over the 28 pages are
likely to raise the question of why the blue-ribbon, 10-member
panel effectively overruled the recommendations of some its
staff and produced a final report that was widely seen as an
exoneration of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers and
the source of much of al-Qaida’s funding before 9/11.
The files show that the commission’s investigators, which
included veterans of the FBI, justice department, CIA and state
department, confronted the Saudi witnesses in 2003 and 2004 with
evidence and witness accounts that appeared to confirm their
involvement with a network of other Saudi expatriates in
southern California who provided shelter, food and other support
to two of the 9/11 hijackers – Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid
al-Mihdhar – in the year before the attacks. The two hijackers,
both Saudis, were aboard American Airlines flight 77 when it
crashed into the Pentagon.
According to the newly declassified interrogation reports,
another key Saudi witness who appeared before the commission,
Osama Basnan, a man described as “the informal mayor” of the
Islamic community in San Diego before 9/11, was repeatedly
caught in lies when asked about his relationship to Saudis in
the support network. Basnan, who returned home to Saudi Arabia
after coming under investigation after 9/11, had an “utter lack
of credibility on virtually every material subject” in denying
any role in a terrorist support network, the report said.
Basnan came under scrutiny, in part, because of tens of
thousands of dollars in cashiers’ checks that his ailing wife
received before 9/11 from a charitable fund controlled by the
wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Princess Haifa
al-Faisal. Congressional investigators determined that much of
that money, which totaled as much as $70,000, had been turned
over to the family of another Saudi man in San Diego, Omar
al-Bayoumi, who was at the center of efforts to assist the two
hijackers, including moving them from Los Angeles to San Diego
and helping them find an apartment and enter flight school.
Telephone records would show that Bayoumi had been in close
contact throughout the period with Thumairy, the Saudi diplomat
in Los Angeles who was eventually detained and deported from the
US on terrorism charges.
Although the 9/11 commission’s report drew no final conclusion
about the roles of Basnan and Bayoumi, former US senator Bob
Graham, the Florida Democrat who led the joint House-Senate
intelligence committee that wrote the 28 pages, has said
repeatedly over the years that he is convinced that both men
were low-level Saudi government intelligence officers and that
money from the embassy charity fund may well have ended up with
the two hijackers. Graham has said he believes both Basnan and
Bayoumi were Saudi government “spies” who had been dispatched to
southern California to keep watch on dissidents in the area’s
relatively large community of Saudi expatriates.
The newly declassified files from the commission show that
questions about Princess Haifa, her charity fund and the two
hijackers were considered so serious that they were raised
directly in an October 2003 meeting in Saudi Arabia between the
commission’s investigators and the then-deputy Saudi foreign
minister Nizar Madani. “Nizar expressed disbelief about the
allegations regarding Princess Haifa, noting it was preposterous
that she was involved in terrorism,” according to the
commission’s summary of the meeting. The Saudi government has
insisted that the princess, a daughter of the late King Faisal,
had no reason to believe that the money would be used for
anything other than to pay medical bills for Basnan’s wife, who
suffered from thyroid problems, and to cover the family’s
household expenses.
The report prepared after the interrogation of Bayoumi, who was
paid a salary in San Diego by a Saudi aviation contractor but
was unable to prove that he actually did any work for the
company, documents his tense confrontation with the commission’s
investigators during their visit to Saudi Arabia in October
2003, especially when he was presented with evidence of the
“damning appearance of the circumstances surrounding” his ties
to the two hijackers.
Bayoumi said he was innocent of any connection to terrorism and
said “the description of him as a ‘Saudi spy’ hurt him very
much”, the newly-released report said. He said it was
coincidence that led him to an Arab-food restaurant in Los
Angeles where he first met the two hijackers, who spoke almost
no English, in January 2000. According to the report, “he
professed his feelings for the victims of the 9/11 attacks,
citing his daughter’s US citizenship and the many friends he has
in the US”.
The commission’s newly declassified files suggest that the
commission staff considered the questioning of Thumairy to be
the most important of the interrogations conducted in Saudi
Arabia, since the young Saudi was not only an accredited
diplomat and an imam of a large Saudi government-built mosque in
southern California. He had also been posted to the US at the
request of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, long
considered by American intelligence agencies to be supportive of
Islamic extremist groups outside Saudi Arabia. In Los Angeles,
he was known among fellow Saudis to hold fundamentalist views on
Islam.
At the first of two sessions “Thumairy initially sat at the
table with his hands folded in front of him”, the interrogation
report said. “Over the course of the interview, his posture
changed noticeably when the questions became more
confrontational. During such instances, al-Thumairy would cross
his arms, sit back in his chair and rely more heavily on the
interpreter.”
The questions became especially difficult for Thumairy as he
kept insisting that he did not know many of the others Saudis in
southern California who had been linked to the two hijackers,
including Bayoumi, despite phone logs and other records showing
he had been in contact with Bayoumi dozens of times. He was
presented with a statement from a witness, another Saudi cleric
in Los Angeles, who recalled often seeing Thumairy and Bayoumi
meeting at the southern California mosque. Presented with the
evidence, Thumairy became agitated. “Thumairy initially said he
may have been mistaken for somebody else,” the interrogation
report said. “He then said there are some people who may say
things that are false out of mere spite or jealousy.”
Pressed on whether he had led conversations about “jihad” at the
mosque among Saudi worshippers, Thumairy confirmed there were
discussions “but that it was only about ‘good’ jihad, not ‘bad’
jihad. He said this discussion was not only necessary, but that
it was his responsibility to teach the Islamic community the
difference between good and bad jihad, especially after 9/11”.
Philip Shenon is the author of
The Commission: The Uncensored
History of the 9/11 Investigation |