FBI Brokers Accuse CIA of 9/11 Coverup
UPDATED
LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a short, mundane scene whose significance solely turns into obvious afterward. Round lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a person dropped a bit of paper close to a desk in a Center Japanese restaurant exterior Los Angeles and paused lengthy sufficient to strike up a dialog with two Arabic-speaking males eating close by. It might take FBI brokers practically 20 years to grasp the complete which means of that small occasion.
The person who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, just lately declassified FBI paperwork present. And the 2 Arabic-speaking males with whom he struck up a dialog with have been Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the primary two future 9/11 hijackers to reach in the USA. Was this assembly, because the alleged agent later claimed to investigators, mere happenstance? Or was it an intelligence operation being performed on U.S. soil? It was an intelligence operation, in line with a previously-unreported court filing SpyTalk has obtained that corroborates and expands our understanding of this extraordinary assembly, which passed off simply because the 9/11 plot was taking form.
The court docket submitting particulars a five-year inquiry by an investigator for the Guantanamo Military Commission into whether or not the assembly on the Mediterranean Gourmand restaurant was an operation that concerned not solely Saudi brokers however CIA officers as nicely.
The idea that the CIA had launched a failed effort to recruit the hijackers via the Saudis has been round for years, and was at all times circumstantial at finest, however the doc obtained by SpyTalk reveals there may be extra proof to help it. One former FBI agent claimed to the investigator that the CIA possesses high secret “operational” information and a “paper path” concerning the Saudi spy who met the hijackers which can be nonetheless being suppressed.
A CIA spokesperson denied that the company was hiding info. The FBI declined to remark.
The revelations have been present in a 21-page court document filed in 2021 on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba the place the instances of the 9/11 defendants are being heard. The doc was on the general public docket, however went unreported as a result of it was utterly redacted apart from an unclassified marking. Spytalk obtained an unredacted copy.
The authorized submitting consists of summaries of interviews with nameless FBI brokers, 9/11 Fee employees and others who investigated the assaults on New York and Washington. It was compiled by Don Canestraro, an investigator for the Workplace of Navy Commissions, because the court docket listening to the instances of the 9/11 defendants is formally recognized. Canestraro beforehand served for greater than 20 years as an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Canestraro’s submitting is chock-full of recent particulars concerning the a number of investigations into 9/11. And it follows the discharge final yr of declassified FBI documents that supplied an unprecedented portrait of Saudi intelligence operations inside America. Learn collectively, this new info raises points that go to the guts of America’s fraught relationship with the oil-rich Kingdom—and the 9/11 assaults.
4 unnamed former FBI brokers concerned within the 9/11 investigation informed Canestraro they believed the CIA was masking up an operation on U.S. soil to penetrate Al Qaeda. Probably the most explosive allegations come from a former FBI agent who spoke to Canestraro in June 2021. The previous agent, recognized solely as CS-23, was described as having “intensive data of counterterrorism and counterintelligence issues.”
CS-23 pointedly described the assembly between the Saudi agent and the hijackers on the Center Japanese Gourmand restaurant as a part of “an operation directed by the Central Intelligence Company,” and indicated that the CIA has “operational” information on Bayoumi that predated 9/11.
Earlier than 9/11, in line with CS-23, the CIA was decided to get a human supply inside Osama bin Laden’s terror community, and the arrival of two members of Al Qaeda in Southern California in January 2000 supplied an unprecedented alternative. The CIA is legally barred from accumulating info on U.S. residents “however its international intelligence assortment mission might be performed wherever,” in line with the agency website.
Collaborators
After 9/11, CS-23 informed Canestraro, “FBI officers in San Diego and at FBI headquarters turned conscious of each Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and subsequently the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar via Bayoumi.” Senior FBI officers “suppressed investigations” into the matter, C-23 stated.
CS-23’s account couldn’t be independently verified. Canestraro stated all the previous CIA officers and FBI brokers he spoke with have been granted anonymity and Canestraro stated he couldn’t put SpyTalk in contact with CS-23 with out violating attorney-client privilege.
Canestraro stated his investigation wouldn’t have been attainable with out preliminary assurances of confidentiality. The FBI has tried to silence at the least one former agent who spoke publicly about Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 investigation. In a 2019 letter, a duplicate of which was obtained by SpyTalk, the bureau reminded the agent of the responsibility of confidentiality that he agreed to when he joined the bureau and instructed him to clear all future disclosures with headquarters.
The start line for this investigation, Canestraro wrote, was Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi man who met the 2 hijackers within the Center Japanese Gourmand restaurant on Venice Boulevard in Culver Metropolis. Bayoumi performed a important function in serving to the 2 newly-arrived hijackers settle in the USA. He inspired the 2 males to return to San Diego and as soon as there, he helped them open financial institution accounts, discovered them an condo, paid their safety deposit, co-signed their lease, and threw a welcoming occasion for them. He additionally launched the hijackers to Anwar al-Aulaqi, then an imam at a mosque in San Diego, California who “reportedly served as their non secular advisor throughout their time in San Diego,” in line with the joint congressional committee’s report on 9/11. Aulaqi was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.
Legal professionals for the 9/11 defendants in Guantanamo have requested a decide to order the CIA, the FBI, Congress, and the 9/11 Fee to show over all paperwork referring to Bayoumi. “Individuals able to know have recommended that the CIA hid details about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s journey as a result of the CIA wished to recruit them via Saudi intelligence, which might go an extended technique to help the protection principle that the USA and Al Qaeda aren’t at warfare,” protection attorneys wrote in a movement to compel discovery. Canestraro’s affidavit was connected to the movement. A decide within the slow-moving navy commissions has nonetheless not but dominated on the movement.
Bayoumi was a topic of FBI investigations that stretched over greater than 20 years, and he was lengthy suspected to have been a Saudi intelligence agent. However he was definitely no James Bond. He was continuously noticed videotaping occasions on the native mosque. Even one of many hijackers thought Bayoumi was a spy, in line with the 9/11 Fee. He lived together with his household in San Diego on a pupil visa, regardless of not attending courses, and he obtained a wage from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for a job he by no means carried out. However Bayoumi informed FBI brokers in Riyadh in 2003 that the declare that he was a spy was “completely not true.” Bayoumi told the 9/11 Commission that Hazmi’s description of him as a spy “harm him very a lot.”
Robert McFadden, a former senior counterterrorism agent with the Naval Legal Investigative Service, tells SpyTalk he understood Bayoumi’s grievance. Bayoumi “was seemingly a helpful, marginally employed, Saudi authorities fixer and facilitator for Riyadh, who ‘took care’ of fool expats just like the Hazmi brothers and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had by no means traveled to the U.S. earlier than or had a lot English,” McFadden stated. “Most significantly, a Bayoumi would control any recognized or suspected Saudi opposition exercise.”
Bayoumi appeared on the FBI’s radar earlier than 9/11, when he attracted suspicion from his San Diego condo supervisor. In line with CS-23, FBI particular brokers in San Diego queried the CIA as a part of that inquiry. The company reported that it had no info on Bayoumi. That was a “falsehood,” C-23 informed Canestraro in June 2001.
“C-23 acknowledged the CIA maintained ‘operational’ information on Omar al-Bayoumi,” Canestraro wrote. “CS-23 defined to me that ‘operational’ information are these information associated to an intelligence operation performed by a given company. CS-23 additional defined that he/she was conscious of a ‘paper path’ regarding al-Bayoumi.”
Canestraro says CS-23’s account suggests the CIA hid important proof from the FBI about an agent of Saudi intelligence. “The CIA didn’t share all it knew about Bayoumi with the FBI each previous to and after the 9/11 assaults,” he informed SpyTalk. “Actually, this impacted the FBI’s investigations into Bayoumi.”
A CIA spokesperson strongly disputed that declare, however stopped in need of claiming that such information don’t exist.
“The allegation that CIA is ‘hiding’ info associated to the assaults of September11th, 2001, is fake,” the CIA spokesperson tells SpyTalk. “CIA has absolutely complied with Executive Order 14040 of September 2021, which mandated the evaluate and, wherever attainable, public launch of presidency info ‘collected and generated in the USA Authorities’s investigation’ of the assaults. In step with the manager order, CIA declassified the utmost quantity of data attainable in a whole bunch of paperwork, which are actually publicly out there on-line.”
A veteran CIA case officer concerned within the 9/11 investigation tells SpyTalk that there could very nicely be some info on Bayoumi in a file someplace within the company. The CIA has contacts with many individuals, everywhere in the world, and case officers are required to doc them, this particular person stated. However the risk {that a} CIA officer met Bayoumi as soon as years in the past doesn’t imply something by itself, he stated, and FBI brokers making a giant deal out of which can be simply making an attempt to shift blame away from the bureau’s failure to heed the pre-9/11 warnings of its personal brokers. An FBI agent in Phoenix, for instance, requested an investigation of terrorists coaching at U.S. flight faculties. One other agent in Minnesota wrote a memo theorizing that Zacarias Moussaoui, now serving life in jail for his function within the assaults, appeared like a terrorist planning to “fly a aircraft into the World Commerce Heart.” Each have been ignored.
“For them to say we’re holding out on them now—fuck you,” the CIA veteran says. “That’s what I need to say to all of you: Fuck you, assholes. Three thousand folks lifeless and 22 years later, and also you’re nonetheless making an attempt to clean the stain off the FBI.”
One other CIA veteran informed SpyTalk he discovered the recruiting principle laughable: The Saudis would by no means enable the CIA to recruit certainly one of their very own residents. However he stated he wouldn’t put something previous the personnel in Alec Station, because the CIA’s bin Laden station was recognized— together with going out of channels to attempt to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar.
Rogue Operators
(It wouldn’t be the primary or final time: Years after former FBI particular agent and personal investigator Robert Levinson went lacking in Kish Island, Iran, in 2007 for instance, his household discovered that he had gone “on the course of sure CIA analysts who had no authority to run operations abroad,” in line with a Washington Post investigation. The CIA had informed the Senate Intelligence Committee and FBI that the spy company “had nothing to do with him going to Iran.”
Two former CIA case officers who spoke to Canestraro noticed Alec Station as a spot the place the conventional guidelines didn’t apply. Positioned in a northern Virginia workplace exterior CIA headquarters, Alec Station was full of analysts who noticed themselves as operatives. Though they weren’t undercover, the analysts would refer to one another by their code names across the workplace. Regardless of their restricted operational coaching, the analysts at Alec Station would additionally direct operations within the subject and even went as far as to dam one operation concentrating on Al Qaeda, in line with Canestraro’s interviews.
“CS-10,” a 25-year CIA veteran, “informed me that the analysts at UBL station felt that they may undertake operations as simply because the case officers despite the fact that that they had not been educated in covert intelligence-gathering methods,” Canestraro wrote.
The opposite former CIA case officer, CS-11, informed Canestraro that “it might have been tough” for any of the analysts “to run an operation out of UBL Station with out approval from different CIA officers.”
The idea a couple of failed CIA recruitment effort surfaced in Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2007 ebook, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent detailed to the CIA, was the first former insider to go public together with his perception that the spy company sought to make use of Bayoumi to recruit the hijackers. Richard Clarke, the Nationwide Safety Council counterterrorism coordinator within the Clinton and Bush White Homes, adopted with a 2016 article claiming {that a} main ingredient of the 9/11 tragedy remained unrevealed. Clarke wrote that he too believed that the CIA had used Bayoumi to method the hijackers in what he known as a “false flag” operation.
Clarke tells SpyTalk that he started to suspect one thing was amiss when CIA Director George Tenet paid a private go to to his workplace within the White Home after 9/11. The CIA’s inspector normal was inspecting whether or not the company had carried out sufficient to cease the assaults. Tenet, accompanied by two of his lieutenants, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, requested Clarke to put in writing a letter to the inspector normal, John Helgerson, praising the company’s efficiency. Clarke was a little bit hesitant to put in writing a letter on Tenet’s behalf however he finally did say one thing alongside the traces of what they requested, he informed SpyTalk.
What struck Clarke as odd was how nervous the CIA director appeared. “What was surprising to me was right here’s the CIA director actually frightened a couple of CIA inspector normal investigation into him and his relationship to 9/11,” Clarke says. “That’s one of many causes I’ve typically thought that my recruitment principle was in all probability proper.”
Philip Zelikow, former govt director of the 9/11 Fee, has stated there was no proof to help such a principle. “If the ‘recruitment principle’ posited by Clarke and Rossini have been true, there can be proof of a recruitment effort—some CIA try and find and call al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. There isn’t a such proof. Nor was there any proof of a recruitment plan and even the consideration of 1,” Zelikow wrote in a 2017 article. (Zelikow didn’t return emails from SpyTalk.)
A number of former FBI brokers informed Canestraro that the alleged recruitment effort defined probably the most evident intelligence-sharing failures within the runup to 9/11: The CIA’s failure to inform the FBI upon studying that the hijackers have been headed to the USA. Not solely did the CIA fail to take the easy step of placing the hijackers’ names on a watchlist, it additionally blocked FBI brokers detailed to the CIA from sending a memo informing FBI headquarters. Nineteen months later Mihdhar and Hazmi have been a part of a crew that hijacked American Airways Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.
Finish Run
Rossini was an eyewitness to the CIA’s efforts to forestall his headquarters from studying that Mihdhar had a multiple-entry U.S. visa. (Rossini declined to remark for the file for this story.) However in interviews in 2015 and a short memoir that was printed on-line, Rossini revealed {that a} CIA officer within the company’s bin Laden station ordered him in early 2000 to maintain silent. It was “not a matter for the FBI,” Rossini says he was informed. “The following Al Qaeda assault goes to be in Southeast Asia, and if and after we need to let the FBI know we’ll and you aren’t to say something.” Rossini didn’t title the CIA officer, however she has beforehand been recognized as Michael Anne Casey.
The CIA’s Inspector Common concluded that the company’s failure to cross the knowledge on Hazmi and Midhar’s arrival to the FBI till August 2001 was not a mistake borne out of a reluctance to share it however moderately certainly one of poor implementation, steering, and oversight of processes designed to foster exchanges. An nameless CIA officer—subsequently recognized as Tom Wilshire, a former deputy chief of the bin Laden station—informed the joint congressional committee investigating 9/11, “One thing apparently was dropped someplace and we do not know the place that was.”
SpyTalk was capable of establish a few of Canestraro’s sources. Rossini’s earlier statements match these of the previous FBI agent recognized in Canestraro’s submitting as “CS-3.”The assertion of “CS-4” matches the account in Newsweek of James Bernazzani, who oversaw the FBI contingent within the CIA’s Counterterrorist Heart and described how he rushed phrase on Hazmi and Midhar right down to headquarters as quickly as he discovered of it. (Bernazzani didn’t return messages left searching for remark.)
Rossini’s assertion to Canestraro provides a brand new wrinkle to his model of occasions. A couple of years after 9/11, Rossini says he was at CIA headquarters, when he heard James Pavitt, the CIA deputy director for operations, and Director George Tenet talk about the 9/11 Fee’s request to talk with Michael Anne Casey, the CIA officer who instructed him that Mihdhar’s visa was “not a matter for the FBI.” Pavitt informed Tenet that he was “glad” the CIA had stored Casey away from the 9/11 Fee, Rossini stated, and Tenet agreed that it was a good suggestion. “CS-3 acknowledged that the dialog indicated two CIA officers had conspired to hinder the 9/11 Fee,” Canestraro wrote. (The CIA didn’t reply to questions concerning the purported dialog. Tenet didn’t return a message left searching for remark. Pavitt died final December.)
Rossini left the FBI 2008 after pleading responsible to criminally accessing an FBI database for info that was later utilized by Hollywood personal eye Anthony Pellicano. He pleaded not responsible final yr in a federal corruption case involving a former governor of Puerto Rico.
Canestraro’s court docket submitting in Guantanamo additionally raises long-simmering questions concerning the Saudi authorities and 9/11. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers have been from Saudi Arabia. Was the Saudi authorities related in any technique to the terrorist plot? Did any Saudi authorities officers have prior data of the plan to assault New York and Washington?
The U.S. intelligence neighborhood has been grappling with these questions for years. The CIA Inspector Common’s 9/11 Overview Crew reported in 2005 that it discovered no proof that the Saudi authorities knowingly and willingly supported Al Qaeda. However newly declassified paperwork reveal that, at a minimal, the Saudi authorities knew way more about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s arrival in America than it was letting on to the FBI.
One other certainly one of Canestraro’s interviewees, recognized as CS-8, informed him that “diplomatic strain” was exerted on the FBI to not examine the Saudi authorities’s connections to the 9/11 assaults. The particular person didn’t elaborate.
A recently declassified FBI memo from 2017 revealed the bureau’s belated discovery that Bayoumi was paid a month-to-month stipend as a “cooptee” of the Saudi Common Intelligence Presidency. (A cooptee is a citizen of a rustic, however not an officer or worker of that nation’s intelligence service, who assists that service on a brief or alternative foundation.) The memo notes that the allegations of Bayoumi’s involvement with Saudi intelligence weren’t confirmed on the time of the 9/11 Fee’s report, which had concluded that Bayoumi was “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamic extremists.
Amorphous Net
Bayoumi was a part of a Saudi intelligence community that defied conventions. The top of the Saudi Common Intelligence Presidency earlier than 9/11 was the veteran spymaster Prince Turki al Faisal. Bayoumi, nevertheless, was paid out of channels by, and reported to, Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the USA and shut good friend of the Bush household, in line with a declassified FBI memo. Info that Bayoumi collected on individuals of curiosity within the Saudi neighborhood in San Diego and Los Angeles was forwarded to Prince Bandar, not Prince Turki. Prince Bandar and his spouse, Princess Haifa al Faisal, additionally despatched cash to an in depth affiliate of Bayoumi in San Diego and the affiliate’s spouse, in line with FBI reporting.
The CIA, which had an in depth relationship with Prince Bandar, noticed the Saudi embassy intelligence community as enterprise as standard. “That is regular intelligence assortment from [any] embassy within the West,” the CIA veteran who labored on the 9/11 investigation says. The USA and Saudi Arabia had reached an understanding via a covert alliance that went again a long time. Within the Seventies, Saudi Arabia joined forces with the USA and different international locations to battle Communism, particularly in Africa, the place the Soviet Union was backing an array of insurgent teams and organizations. The alliance got here to be generally known as the “Safari Membership.” Saudi Arabia bankrolled U.S. intelligence operations and arrange covert banking companies for the company. In a while the Saudis funded the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contra rebels on the request of the Reagan White Home and the CIA. The Saudis additionally showered cash on the Afghan mujahideen as they battled the occupying Soviet Purple Military within the Nineteen Eighties. Hundreds of Saudis traveled to Afghanistan to battle alongside the mujahideen, together with Osama bin Laden, who went on to discovered Al Qaeda with cash from his rich household.
The CIA veteran concerned within the 9/11 investigation detailed one other little-known instance of Saudi cooperation after the assaults. Shortly after the September 11 calamity, the Saudis loaded a aircraft with reams of data on Al Qaeda and delivered it to the CIA.
“It was probably the most spectacular information dump I’ve ever seen in my life,” the previous CIA case officer says. “It was each piece of data they could have had about anyone who may need been an Al Qaeda man.” That info would show important years later in figuring out a courier and including to the puzzle that led the company to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.
The Saudi-CIA cooperation was not at all times clean. After 9/11, there was a curious dispute that concerned Saudi princes Turki and Bandar, the CIA, and the primary two hijackers to reach in the USA. The usually-secretive Saudis officers publicly revealed a number of intelligence suggestions they supplied to the USA. Prince Turki informed The Related Press that his company had handed phrase to the CIA in late 1999 and early 2000 that Hazmi and Mihdhar have been members of Al Qaeda.
“What we informed them was these folks have been on our watch record from earlier actions of Al Qaeda, in each the embassy bombings and makes an attempt to smuggle arms into the Kingdom,” Turki stated. As well as, Nawaf Obaid, a safety marketing consultant to the Saudi authorities, informed writer Lawrence Wright that the names of the long run hijackers got to the then-station chief in Riyadh. That wasn’t the one tip the U.S. intelligence neighborhood had on the hijackers. In late 1999, the U.S. intelligence neighborhood intercepted communications revealing that “Khalid” (Mihdhar) and “Nawaf” (Hazmi) had been summoned to an Al Qaeda assembly in Malaysia. A CIA desk officer famous that “one thing extra nefarious [was] afoot.”
A heads-up from Saudi intelligence would go a great distance to assist clarify why the CIA was so carefully monitoring Hazmi and Mihdhar as they made their technique to the USA in 2000. The CIA, nevertheless, furiously denied Prince Turki’s account, saying it didn’t obtain any info from Saudi Arabia concerning the two future hijackers’ connections to Al Qaeda till after 9/11. Prince Bandar then issued a “clarification” to Prince Turki’s account: There have been “no paperwork despatched by Saudi Arabia concerning Mihdhar and Hamzi previous to September 11.” In different phrases, there was no paper path for Congress, the FBI, or the 9/11 Fee to seek out. Prince Turki later retracted his assertion in an interview with writer Lawrence Wright.
Maybe Prince Turki acquired it incorrect (or lied for his personal causes). Or maybe his feedback had touched on secrets and techniques that the Saudis have been simply as determined to hide because the CIA. In 2007, the FBI opened Operation Encore to look at the community that supported Hazmi and Mihdhar once they arrived in the USA barely capable of communicate English. The FBI closed Operation Encore in 2021 after discovering inadequate proof to cost any Saudi authorities official with conspiring to assist the hijackers perform the 9/11 assault.
Hidden Fingers
One among Encore’s extra beautiful findings, nevertheless, was that the primary two hijackers to reach in the USA have been aided by a militant Islamic community created and funded by officers within the Saudi embassy below the management of Bush household good friend Prince Bandar.
The Saudi authorities and its embassy in Washington performed a key function in “the funding and creation of a large number of Islamic organizations, workplaces, imams, and different non secular figures with within the US—lots of which have been concerned with militant ideology,” in line with an FBI memo from 2021 highlighting Saudi authorities connections to 9/11. “A number of of those have been recognized to be tied on to Prince Bandar and/or have been concerned with the gathering of data on US-based Islamic entities.”
In line with the FBI, the Saudi militant community within the U.S. served a twin operate. It promoted Wahhabism, an ultraconservative department of Islam based mostly on a literal studying of the Koran. It additionally collected intelligence on the dissidents that the royal household considered as a menace. It was this community that assisted the hijackers once they landed at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport on January 15, 2000. And if Mark Rossini, Richard Clarke, and CS-23 are right, it was this community that was concerned within the effort to recruit at the least one of many hijackers on the behest of the CIA’s Alec Station operatives.
The Saudi Embassy didn’t reply to a request searching for remark. A 2021 statement from the Embassy stated that any allegation of Saudi complicity with the 9/11 plot was categorically false.
The militant community in Southern California was run by an in depth affiliate of Prince Bandar’s whose title was kept secret till just lately. A person named Musaed al-Jarrah ran the Islamic Affairs workplace throughout the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Jarrah was a “recognized” Saudi intelligence officer, in line with the 2021 FBI memo. He was additionally a key determine within the investigation of Saudi authorities ties to the 9/11 plot. “Jarrah was a controlling, guiding, and directing affect on all facets of Sunni extremist exercise in Southern California,” the 2021 memo states. “Jarrah had quite a few contacts with terrorism suspects all through the U.S.” Jarrah left the USA in 2006 after coming below suspicion for his hyperlinks to terrorism. He continued working for Prince Bandar within the Saudi Nationwide Safety Ministry in Riyadh, in line with the 2021 FBI memo.
From Jarrah, the FBI discovered a path resulting in the hijackers. Brokers uncovered proof that Jarrah had directed Bayoumi and an worker of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles to assist the hijackers, in line with FBI paperwork. Bayoumi was in direct contact with Jarrah across the time of the hijackers’ arrival in the USA.
The 9/11 Fee steered clear of those points when it interviewed Prince Bandar in October 2003 at his dwelling in McLean, Virginia. Bandar didn’t volunteer details about Bayoumi or the militant community within the U.S. that his employees had fostered—and it seems he was not requested about both situation, in line with notes of the conversation that have been declassified in 2019.
However Bandar took a conciliatory method. He defined that his authorities “selected to not see” the unconventional fundamentalists in its midst. The federal government “handled them very similar to People deal with the Amish,” Bandar informed the 9/11 Fee. “We enable them to flourish and haven’t any cause to consider that their lifestyle would do anybody hurt.” The Saudi prince quoted from Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s basic novel on the Black expertise: “I’m invisible since you select to not see me.” Left unexplored was the function that Wahhabism, the austere state faith that the Saudi authorities had unfold across the globe, could have performed in radicalizing Osama bin Laden and different militant fundamentalists.
Now, 20 years later, an nameless FBI agent has come ahead to say that there’s proof about 9/11 implicating Saudi Arabia and the CIA that is still invisible to the general public. Former FBI brokers say the CIA should still be hiding what it is aware of concerning the first two 9/11 hijackers to reach in the USA, in addition to the true the reason why no one informed the FBI they have been coming to America. Canestraro tells SpyTalk that his submitting exhibits the CIA is hiding info. “There are information within the authorities’s possession that neither the navy commissions nor most of the people have seen concerning Saudi Arabia’s potential function in 9/11,” he stated. “These information ought to be at a minimal launched to the navy commissions.”
Till then, solutions to the remaining 9/11 riddles will stay out of sight.###
Notice: This story has been up to date so as to add that Mark Rossini was pressured to resign from the FBI in 2008 after pleading responsible to 5 felony counts for criminally accessing data in an FBI database. In 2022 he pleaded not responsible in an ongoing federal corruption case involving a former governor of Puerto Rico.
Seth Hettena is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and writes about nationwide safety and politics from San Diego.