Report Is Wary of Saudi Actions

Top U.S. officials believe the Saudi Arabian government not only thwarted their efforts to prevent the rise of Al Qaeda and stop terrorist attacks, but also may have given the Saudi-born Sept. 11 hijackers financial and logistic support, according to a congressional report released Thursday.

Those suspicions prompted several lawmakers to demand that the Bush administration aggressively investigate Saudi Arabia’s actions before and after Sept. 11, 2001 -- in part by making public large sections of the report that pertain to Riyadh but remain classified. The passages, including an entire 28-page section, detail whether one of America’s most reluctant allies in the war on terrorism was somehow implicated in the attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the full report.

The joint House-Senate committee that investigated the attacks found no “smoking gun” showing that Saudi officials knowingly did anything to help the 19 hijackers -- 15 of whom were young Saudi militants -- one of those officials said.

But the committee, known as the “joint inquiry,” developed “information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”

At least one of those sources, the officials confirmed, was the government of Saudi Arabia.

When testifying behind closed doors last summer, neither CIA nor FBI officials were able to tell committee members “definitively the extent of such support for the hijackers globally or within the United States, or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature.”

The report added that the intelligence agencies had recently strengthened efforts to unravel the money trail, “at least in part due to the joint inquiry’s focus on this issue.”

“In the view of the joint inquiry, this gap in U.S. intelligence coverage is unacceptable, given the magnitude and immediacy of the potential risk to U.S. national security,” the report continued. “The intelligence community needs to address this area of concern as aggressively and as quickly as possible.”

FBI and CIA officials said Thursday that they were heeding the committee’s request. But several senior U.S. counterterrorism officials cautioned that, despite the inquiry’s concerns, they have seen no evidence to indicate that Saudi officials did anything intentionally to help the hijackers.

Richard Clarke, a former national coordinator for counterterrorism in the Clinton and Bush administrations, cautioned “against saying there is a witting Saudi government connection.”

“I think the Saudi government was throwing around a lot of money to dubious organizations without trying to determine who was asking for it, and that a lot of the money got to Al Qaeda” -- including some operatives in the United States, said Clark, who left the Bush administration this year.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, sharply criticized the report, saying that the “28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people.”

“Rumors, innuendos and untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the day,” Bandar said in a statement. “The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false.

“Al Qaeda is a cult that is seeking to destroy Saudi Arabia as well as the United States,” Bandar said. “By what logic would we support a cult that is trying to kill us? Why would we aid criminals when we were working with the U.S. to find and arrest them?

“It is my belief that the reason a classified section that allegedly deals with foreign governments is absent from the report is most likely because the information contained in it could not be substantiated. Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”

The unclassified portion of the report does not mention payments by Bandar’s wife to a Saudi woman that the FBI believes may have ended up in the bank accounts of at least one of the hijackers.

The nearly 900-page report was based on the interviews of hundreds of U.S. and foreign officials and a review of hundreds of thousands of FBI and CIA files.

The report showed that in the years before the 2001 attacks, the FBI, CIA and other U.S. officials came to believe that the Saudi government would not help in its war on Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden -- a Saudi national and heir to one of the country’s richest construction dynasties.

“According to one U.S. government official, it was clear from about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden,” the report said.

Another U.S. official told investigators that “obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S. government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests.”

And a third high-level U.S. government officer “cited greater Saudi cooperation when asked how the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented,” the congressional report said.

Asked why he believed that, the officer replied that in May 2001, the U.S. government learned that an “individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior Al Qaeda operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming Al Qaeda operation.” But, as is the case in many other passages in the report, the details explaining how the Saudis did not cooperate remains classified despite a seven-month campaign by congressional investigators and others to have them made public.

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers called for the declassification of the report so the role of Saudi Arabia can be explored.

“For whatever reason, there is an attempt here to conceal evidence that implicates the Saudi regime in a terrible tragedy -- a tragedy that claimed the lives of over 3,000 Americans and put hundreds of thousands of troops in harm’s way by leading us into two wars,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the former ranking minority member of the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview that he has read the entire report and feels the classified parts should be made public.

“This might be embarrassing information” to the Saudi government, Shelby said on NBC’s “Today” show, “but I don’t believe it meets the test of real classification.”

The declassified report goes into detail about the much-publicized relationship between a San Diego man named Omar al Bayoumi and two of the Saudi hijackers, whom he befriended in Los Angeles, persuaded to move to San Diego and then provided with financial support and a network of friends and helpers.

Al Bayoumi was probably an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power, according to one of the FBI’s best sources -- something Saudi officials flatly denied. Bayoumi, who lives in Riyadh, could not be reached for comment.

“Declassifying this [report] is particularly important now that we hear that in January 2000, an alleged Saudi agent [Bayoumi] had a meeting at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles -- and then went directly to a restaurant to meet two 9/11 hijackers,” said Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.).

“It is time to lift the veil of secrecy involving possible Saudi complicity in the events of 9/11.”

It could take years to determine whether any Saudi officials or operatives did anything to help further the Sept. 11 plot, U.S. officials said.