Saudis Call Any Aid to Terrorists Unwitting

Saudi officials acknowledged Saturday that the wife of their ambassador to the United States may have unwittingly provided money that eventually helped support two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, but they insisted that Princess Haifa al Faisal never purposely meant to assist the terrorist conspiracy.

Nail al Jubeir, chief spokesman for the Saudi Embassy here, stressed that “the assertion that the princess has supported terrorism is simply untrue and irresponsible.”

He added, “She has provided general assistance to people in need only.”

Justice Department officials here and in Southern California said Saturday that they have not uncovered any evidence suggesting that the princess or any Saudi government officials knowingly provided financial help to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Rather, a California official said, the 19 hijackers were the beneficiaries of money wired directly to them from abroad. “These guys had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars from overseas,” the official said.

The question of what role, if any, the Saudi government may have played in the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, surfaced Friday in a draft report of a congressional investigation.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and two of those hijackers who lived in San Diego received money from two other Saudis in San Diego whose families received financial assistance from Haifa.

The report by the joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee suggests the FBI and CIA did not probe the matter vigorously enough. But law enforcement officials responded by saying the matter was thoroughly reviewed.

On Saturday, one high-placed Justice Department official noted that while the two hijackers received money to pay their rent from the Saudis who had received money from the princess, the hijackers repaid them in cash the same day.

From a strategic standpoint, the official said, the FBI concluded that it just seemed illogical that a Saudi agent -- or the government of Saudi Arabia itself -- would assist the plans of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

“Why would the Saudi government knowingly support a terrorist organization that would attack the U.S.?” the official said. “It would just destabilize their own government even more. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Haifa is the youngest daughter of the late King Faisal and is married to Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Al Jubeir, along with an advisor to Prince Bandar, said the embassy has been scrambling since Friday night to try to reconstruct the princess’ records of payments to needy Saudis in the United States.

Specifically, embassy officials were trying to explain how money from the princess went to Saudi nationals Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, and how they in turn gave financial assistance to two of the hijackers: Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

Saudi officials said the princess maintains an account at Riggs National Bank, the old-line Washington financial institution that has long maintained a special VIP division to handle discreet money transfers for diplomats and aristocrats.

Her office provides Riggs with a list of beneficiaries, some of whom receive monthly stipends. The list includes both individuals and charitable organizations.

Al Jubeir said Haifa has given out college tuition to some 12 students and medical assistance to another half a dozen Saudi immigrants, and she has helped 25 needy people “on a regular monthly basis for various things.”

The applicants submit requests, and if they are approved, Riggs sends cashier checks based on the princess’ list.

A Request for Aid

In April 1998, Bandar and the princess received a letter from Bassnan saying he was in deep trouble and needed money. He wrote that his family was living in Virginia and had four children, and his wife was pregnant and needed thyroid surgery.

The embassy sent them $15,000 and paid the surgical bill.

In November 1998, Bassnan’s wife wrote a letter asking for more help. Soon thereafter, the princess authorized a monthly payment by Riggs bank of $2,000 a month to the wife. The checks were apparently made out to her as Majeda Ibrahim Ahmed. Her full name appears to be Majeda Ibrahim Ahmed al Dweikat. She is a Jordanian citizen.

Many of those checks were then endorsed to Osama Bassnan. Some were endorsed to Janet Bassnan, who is believed to be his daughter. Some were endorsed to a woman named Manal Bajadr, who is believed to be Al Bayoumi’s wife. The families were apparently neighbors in San Diego.

Al Jubeir said Ahmed was treated at UC San Diego beginning in April 2000 and most recently in March, but he would not say what for.

The advisor said of the princess that “it’s not clear how much personal knowledge she had of this case.”

“She personally reads the letters that come in appealing for help, but she asks the staff to check the cases out,” the advisor said.

Al Jubeir said the princess and prince are often flooded with requests for assistance.

“It’s a tradition in Saudi Arabia that the wealthy and the well-off help those who are less fortunate,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long time. The king does it himself.

“It takes an entire staff to go through the whole thing. Every request gets reviewed and checked. And then we get the nutty case like the guy who wants a new car. And yet we have children who are burned or children with a single parent in this country, all who need help. The cases are really enormous. But assistance goes out to those in need.

“But to link Princess Haifa to terrorism is simply irresponsible.”

The FBI discovered the potential connection soon after the terrorist attacks, when the FBI field office was following up hundreds of leads in the San Diego area.

While living in the San Diego area, Al Bayoumi and Bassnan were heavily involved in relocating and offering financial support to Saudi immigrants in the community.

The men helped Almihdhar and Alhazmi when they turned up in Southern California in late 1999. Al Bayoumi initially met them at a Los Angeles restaurant and later brought them to San Diego’s large Muslim community.

There, he paid their first two months’ rent at an apartment and, apparently, was reimbursed that same day.

Al Bayoumi and Bassnan have both left the United States.

Interest in Al Bayoumi

Al Bayoumi left San Diego in April 2001, about six months before the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. He turned up in Birmingham, England, where he was enrolled at Aston University. At the request of the FBI, Al Bayoumi was detained by British authorities about 10 days after the Sept. 11 attack. He was held for about a week, and then let go.

He was set free because U.S. officials had only one criminal complaint against him, visa fraud, according to law enforcement sources. That crime is not an extraditable offense, they noted.

Al Bayoumi has not resurfaced, and even Al Jubeir said that “where he is at this moment, we don’t know.”

Al Bayoumi has been of deep interest to U.S. officials.

A top Justice Department official in San Diego said in a recent interview that the FBI served a search warrant on a mosque in the San Diego area, hunting for material belonging to Al Bayoumi.

“They searched a room at the mosque looking for things related to him,” the official said. “It was his private office there. That mosque was a Saudi Arabian-financed venture.”

The FBI found the names of two Saudi embassy employees in Al Bayoumi’s San Diego apartment. Al Jubeir said the employees worked in the embassy’s Islamic Affairs Department.

“Al Bayoumi called the embassy a number of times, and there was a link there,” he said. “The FBI called us and we allowed the employees to be interviewed by the FBI. And that was the end of that, in October or November of 2001.”

He added: “I don’t know why he had those names.”

“He called them constantly,” Al Jubeir said. “But I wouldn’t be too surprised about that. Every Saudi student has a number for the people in charge of my public affairs section for information, literature and pamphlets. We also get about 2,000 e-mails a day.”

Bassnan and his wife were arrested on Aug. 22 in Southern California on visa fraud violations, according to Al Jubeir. She was deported earlier this month, and he was returned to Saudi Arabia a week ago.

“But we have had no requests from anyone in the FBI to interview him,” Al Jubeir said.

In Washington, some congressional sources said that members of the joint intelligence committee continue to doubt whether the FBI worked hard enough to resolve the matter of how Saudi money got to the San Diego hijackers.

That issue is described as a key remaining question in the panel’s draft report. But the Justice Department quickly responded that hundreds of leads were properly and thoroughly followed in San Diego.

Four people were arrested on material witness warrants alleging that they had crucial information about the Sept. 11 attacks, and three of them testified before a federal grand jury in New York.

Bill Gore, special agent-in-charge of the FBI’s San Diego field office, said in a recent interview that agents did not find concrete links between the San Diego hijackers and other people in the U.S. to suggest that others here were aware of the terrorist plot and were assisting the hijackers.

“We had a pretty good feel for what and who we considered threats in the community, and who were associated with terrorist organizations,” he said.

But, he added, the hijackers “didn’t associate with people we suspected of being involved in terrorist organizations. They were self-controlled. They were funded from abroad. They didn’t come up in our normal intelligence investigations.”

‘A Lot of Half-Truths’

Several Justice Department officials, in Washington and Southern California, suggested Saturday that the congressional committee is overreacting by suggesting that the FBI or the CIA did not properly investigate any Saudi government link to the hijackers.

The officials said the committee learned about Al Bayoumi and Bassnan during briefings with agents, but apparently was not satisfied that agents had done enough to pursue the matter.

Said one Justice official: “There are a lot of half-truths floating around right now. But when you get to the facts, you will see the people [raising questions] are either wrong or they are making theories into conclusions.”

Another official said the committee “thinks they are expert investigators.” But, he added, “they assume too much.”

*

Times staff writers Greg Miller and Rich Simon contributed to this report.