Saudi Officials May Have Deliberately Assisted 9/11 Hijackers, New Evidence Suggests — ProPublica

From the start of U.S. investigations into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the question of whether the Saudi government might have been involved has hovered over the case.

The FBI, after the most extensive criminal probe in its history, concluded that a low-level Saudi official who helped the first two hijackers in California met them by chance and aided them unwittingly. The CIA said it saw no evidence of a higher-level Saudi role. The bipartisan 9/11 commission adopted those findings. A small FBI team continued to dig into the question, turning up information that raised doubts about some of those conclusions.

But now, 23 years after the attacks, new evidence has emerged to suggest more strongly than ever that at least two Saudi officials deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers when they arrived in the United States in January 2000.

Whether the Saudis knew the men were terrorists remains unclear. But the new information shows that both officials worked with Saudi and other religious figures who had ties to al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

Most of the evidence has been gathered in a long-running federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by survivors of the attacks and relatives of those who died. That lawsuit has reached a critical moment, with a judge in New York preparing to rule on a Saudi motion to dismiss the case.

Already, though, information put forward in the plaintiffs’ case — which includes videos, telephone records and other documents that were collected soon after the attacks but were never shared with key investigators — argues for a fundamental reassessment of the Saudi government’s possible involvement with the hijackers.

The court files also raise questions about whether the FBI and CIA, which repeatedly dismissed the significance of Saudi links to the hijackers, mishandled or deliberately downplayed evidence of the kingdom’s possible complicity in the attacks that killed 2,977 people and injured thousands more.

“Why is this information coming out now?” asked retired FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who pursued the Saudi connections for almost 15 years. “We should have had all of this three or four weeks after 9/11.”

Saudi officials have long denied any involvement in the plot, emphasizing that they were at war with al-Qaida well before 2001.

They have also leaned on earlier U.S. assessments, especially the one-page summary of a joint FBI-CIA report that was publicly released by the Bush administration in 2005. That summary said there was no evidence that “the Saudi Government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support” for the attacks.

Pages of the report that were declassified in 2022 are more critical of the Saudi role, describing extensive Saudi funding for Islamic charities linked to al-Qaida and the reluctance of senior Saudi officials to cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

The plaintiffs’ account still leaves significant gaps in the story of how two known al-Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, avoided CIA surveillance overseas, flew into Los Angeles under their own names and then — despite speaking no English and ostensibly knowing no one — settled in Southern California to start preparing for the attacks.

Still, the lawsuit has exposed layers of contradictions and deceit in the Saudi government’s portrayal of Omar al-Bayoumi, a middle-aged Saudi graduate student in San Diego who was the central figure in the hijackers’ support network.

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, FBI agents identified Bayoumi as having helped the two young Saudis rent an apartment, set up a bank account and take care of other needs. Bayoumi, then 42, was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, in Birmingham, England, where he had moved to continue graduate studies in business. Scotland Yard terrorism investigators questioned him for a week in London as two FBI agents monitored the sessions.

Bayoumi dissembled from the start, newly released transcripts of the interrogations show. He said he barely remembered the two Qaida operatives, having met them by chance in a halal cafe in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, after he stopped at the Saudi Consulate to renew his passport. The evidence shows he actually renewed his passport the day before the encounter in the cafe, one of many indications that his meeting with the hijackers was planned.

After pressure from Saudi diplomats, Bayoumi was freed by the British authorities without being charged. U.S. officials did not try to have him extradited.

Two years later, in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi sat for interviews with the FBI and the 9/11 commission that were overseen by Saudi intelligence officials. Again, he insisted that he was just being hospitable to the hijackers. He knew nothing of their plans, he said, and was opposed to violent jihad.

Gonzalez and other FBI agents were dubious. Though Bayoumi was supposedly a student, he did almost no studying. He was far more active in setting up a Saudi-funded mosque in San Diego and spreading money around the Muslim community. (The Saudi government paid him surreptitiously through an aviation-services company in Houston.)

FBI officials in Washington accepted the Saudi depiction of Bayoumi as an amiable, somewhat bumbling government accountant trying to improve his skills, and as a devout but moderate Muslim — and not a spy. The lead agent on the FBI team that investigated him, Jacqueline Maguire, told the 9/11 commission that by “all indications,” Bayoumi’s connection with the hijackers had been the result of “a random encounter” at the cafe.

The 9/11 commission accepted that assessment. The commission’s investigators noted Bayoumi’s “obliging and gregarious” manner in interviews and called him “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.” The panel found “no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

But in 2017, the FBI concluded that Bayoumi was, in fact, a Saudi spy — although it kept that finding secret until 2022, after President Joe Biden ordered agencies to declassify more documents from the 9/11 files.

Exactly whom in the Saudi government Bayoumi was working for remains unclear. FBI reports describe him as a “cooptee,” or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence service, but say he reported to the kingdom’s powerful former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Lawyers for the Saudi government have continued to repeat Bayoumi’s earlier denials that he ever had “any assignment” for Saudi intelligence.)

Another layer of Bayoumi’s hidden identity has emerged from documents, videotapes and other materials that were seized from his home and office at the time of his arrest in England. The plaintiffs had sought that information from the Justice Department for years but received almost nothing until the British authorities began sharing their copies of the material in 2023.

Although Saudi officials insist that Bayoumi merely volunteered at a local mosque, the British evidence points to his deeper collaboration with the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The Saudi royals had established the ministry in 1993 as part of a governing pact with the powerful clergy. In return for political support, they gave the clerics effective control over domestic religious matters and funded their efforts to spread their fundamentalist Wahhabi brand of Islam overseas.

From the start of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, agents pored over a short excerpt of a videotape recorded at a party that Bayoumi hosted for some two dozen Muslim men in February 2000, soon after Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego.

It was another coincidence, Bayoumi claimed, that he held the event in the hijackers’ apartment. The two young Saudis had nothing really to do with the gathering, he said, but he needed to keep his wife and other women in his own apartment, sequestered from male guests according to conservative Muslim custom.

The FBI did not share a full copy of the VHS recording with either its own field agents or the 9/11 families, who sought it repeatedly. (An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the bureau’s handling of the Bayoumi evidence.) But the full recording was provided to the plaintiffs by the British police last December.

The longer version casts Bayoumi’s gathering in a different light. Although the nominal guest of honor is a visiting Saudi cleric, the two hijackers are carefully introduced to the other guests and are seemingly at the center of the proceedings.

After identifying many of the party guests for the first time, the plaintiffs’ lawyers were able to document that many went on to play significant roles in the hijackers’ support network, helping them set up internet and telephone service, sign up for English classes and buy a used car.

“Bayoumi hand-picked these individuals because he knew and assessed that they were well-suited to provide the Al Qaeda operatives with important forms of support,” the lawyers wrote of the party guests.

Another videotape taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home is even more at odds with the image he conveyed to the FBI and the 9/11 commission. The video follows Bayoumi as he tours Washington, D.C., with two visiting Saudi clerics early in the summer of 1999.

Lawyers for the Saudi government called the recording an innocent souvenir — “a tourist video that includes footage of artwork, flowerbeds, and a squirrel on the White House lawn.” But the plaintiffs’ lawyers posit a more ominous purpose, especially as Bayoumi focuses on his main subject: an extensive presentation of the Capitol building, which is shown from a series of vantage points and in relation to other Washington landmarks.

“We greet you, the esteemed brothers, and we welcome you from Washington,” Bayoumi says on the video. Later, standing before the camera, he reports as “Omar al-Bayoumi from Capitol Hill, the Capitol building.”

The footage shows the Capitol from various angles, noting architectural features, entrances and the movement of security guards. Bayoumi sprinkles his narration with religious language and refers to a “plan.”

“Bayoumi’s video footage and his narration are not that of a tourist,” the plaintiffs contend in one court document, citing the analysis of a former FBI expert. The video, they add, “bears the hallmarks of terror planning operations identified by law enforcement and counterterrorism investigators in operational videos seized from terror groups including Al Qaeda.”

Lawyers for the Saudi government dismissed this conclusion as preposterous.

But the video’s timing is noteworthy. According to the 9/11 commission report, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders began discussing their “planes operation” in the spring of 1999. Although they disagreed on which U.S. landmarks to strike, the report states, “all of them wanted to hit the Capitol.”

The two Saudi clerics who joined Bayoumi on the trip, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were so-called propagators — emissaries of the Islamic Affairs ministry sent to proselytize abroad. U.S. investigators later linked them to a handful of Islamist militants.

Most notably, Sudairy, whom Bayoumi describes as the emir, or leader, of the Washington trip, spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with Ziyad Khaleel, a Palestinian-American al-Qaida member who delivered a satellite phone to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. The Qaida leader used the phone to coordinate the deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI officials have said.

Sudairy and Sadhan, who had diplomatic status, had previously visited California, working with Bayoumi and staying at a small San Diego guesthouse where the hijackers later lived. Many new details of their travels were revealed in the British documents. The two Saudis had previously denied even knowing Bayoumi, one of many false claims in depositions coordinated by the Saudi government.

The new evidence also shows that Sadhan and Sudairy worked with the other key Saudi official linked to the hijackers, the cleric Fahad al-Thumairy. According to one FBI source, it was Thumairy, the 32-year-old imam of a prominent Saudi mosque in Culver City, who received the hijackers when they arrived on Jan. 15, 2000, and arranged for their temporary housing and other needs.

Thumairy, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs official who was also assigned to the Saudi consulate, insisted he had no memory of Hazmi and Mihdhar, although the three were seen together by several FBI informants. Thumairy also denied knowing Bayoumi, despite telephone records that show at least five dozen calls between them. Thumairy’s diplomatic visa was withdrawn by the State Department in 2003 because of his suspected involvement with terrorist activity.

In an extensive analysis of telephone records produced by the FBI and the British authorities, the plaintiffs also documented what they called patterns of coordination involving Bayoumi, Thumairy and other Saudi officials. (Lawyers for the Saudi government said the calls were about mundane religious matters.)

Two weeks before the hijackers’ arrival, for example, the records show calls among Bayoumi, Thumairy and the Islamic Affairs director at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bayoumi and Thumairy also made a number of calls around that time to a noted Yemeni American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who later emerged as an important Qaida leader in Yemen.

It has long been known 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 other 9/11 hijackers after moving to a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. But many FBI investigators believed he was radicalized well after 9/11 and may not have known the hijackers’ plans.

New evidence filed in the court case points to a more significant relationship. Awlaki appears to have met Hazmi and Mihdhar as soon as they arrived in San Diego. He joined Bayoumi in helping them rent an apartment and set up bank accounts, and he was seen by others to have served as a trusted spiritual advisor.

Awlaki’s worldview “matched quite closely to al-Qaida’s at the time,” said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a biographer of Awlaki who served as an expert for the plaintiffs. “The new information now becoming public, on top of what we already know about his teachings and associations, makes it reasonable to conclude that Awlaki knew the hijackers were part of the al-Qaeda network.”