It was reported over the weekend - just days before the 12-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack - that the Saudi Arabian government supports President Obama's plan to bomb Syria. The administration is touting the Saudis' unsurprising endorsement. But it is steeped in troubling irony. And it begs the question: With friends like Saudi Arabia, who needs enemies?
Syria, as despicable as its leader Bashar al-Assad is, never attacked the United States. But we all seem to have forgotten that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Not Syrians, not Iraqis, not Iranians. Even more troubling is the stockpile of evidence suggesting that the corrupt, oppressive Saudi royals who seem to make our Presidents so giddy not only knew about the terrorist attack, they supported and even funded the despicable Al Qaeda plot.
Despite the links between the Saudi government and the anti-American terrorists, as I reported for The Daily Beast last year, 9/11 could sadly remain a story with missing chapters. In a two-part series you can read on the U-T San Diego website, I addressed many of these unanswered questions. We act as if this were a closed case because Osama bin Laden, who of course was a Saudi, is dead, and because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind who came up with the idea of using hijacked airplanes to attack us, is in custody.
As Graham told me last year, “San Diego was ground zero in terms of the connections between the terrorists and the Saudi government, but there was also a significant investigation in Sarasota, Fla., which most people probably don’t even know about, and which I was not aware of during the inquiry.”
The FBI-led investigation in Sarasota focused on Saudi millionaire Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud. Their upscale home was owned by Anoud al-Hijji’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an adviser to Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the nephew of King Fahd.
The al-Hijji family reportedly moved out of their Sarasota house and left the country abruptly in the weeks before 9/11, leaving behind three luxury cars and personal belongings including clothing, furniture, and fresh food. They also left the swimming pool water circulating.
This account, first reported publicly by author Anthony Summers and Florida investigative reporter Dan Christensen, noted that the gated community’s visitor logs and photos of license tags showed that vehicles driven by several of the future hijackers, as well as other members of al Qaeda, had visited the al-Hijji home.
In early 2000, al-Bayoumi invited two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, to San Diego from Los Angeles. He told authorities he met the two men by chance when he sat next to them at a restaurant. As Newsweek reported in 2002, al-Bayoumi’s invitation was extended on the same day that he visited the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles for a private meeting.
Al-Bayoumi arranged for the two future hijackers to live in an apartment near the San Diego Islamic Center mosque and paid $1,500 to cover their first two months of rent. When asked not long after the 9/11 attacks about al-Bayoumi’s possible involvement, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, then the San Diego head of the FBI, told me that there was no evidence al-Bayoumi played a role.
Gore would not elaborate on how the bureau had come to this conclusion. But a former top FBI official later contradicted Gore, telling Newsweek, “We firmly believed that al-Bayoumi had knowledge (of the 9/11 plot).”
After 9/11, al-Bayoumi was detained by New Scotland Yard while living in the U.K. Gore said the FBI sent agents to London to interview him, but he was released a week later and allowed to return to Saudi Arabia. Newsweek reported that classified sections of the congressional 9/11 inquiry indicated that the Saudi Embassy in London pushed for al-Bayoumi’s release.
Where is al-Bayoumi now? “I can’t say too much, but what I can tell you is that he is still alive and living in Saudi Arabia,” Graham told me last year.
As for Basnan, whom Graham calls “Bayoumi’s successor,” Newsweek reported that he received monthly checks for several years totaling as much as $73,000 from the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, and his wife, Princess Haifa Faisal.
The checks were sent because Basnan’s wife, Majeda Dweikat, needed thyroid surgery, Newsweek and other media outlets reported. But Dweikat inexplicably signed many of the checks over to al-Bayoumi’s wife, Manal Bajadr. This money allegedly made its way into the hands of hijackers Almihdhar and Alhazmi, according to the congressional report.
At a post-9/11 gathering in San Diego, Basnan allegedly called the attack “a wonderful, glorious day” and celebrated the hijackers’ “heroism,” a law-enforcement official told Newsweek.
Despite all this, he was ultimately allowed to return to Saudi Arabia, and Dweikat was deported to Jordan.
Another man who might have helped investigators get to the bottom of this mystery is Abdussattar Shaikh, a longtime FBI asset in San Diego who was friends with al-Bayoumi and invited two of the San Diego-based hijackers to live in his home. However, Shaikh was not allowed by the FBI or the Bush administration to testify before the 9/11 Commission or the JICI.
“For me, that was the low point of the [JICI] investigation,” Graham told me last year for my Daily Beast story. “Bayoumi introduced the hijackers to Shaikh, who clearly knew a lot, but the FBI, who had Shaikh in protective custody, seemed to care more about protecting their asset than allowing us to find out what he knew about 9/11.”
During roughly the same period after the 9/11 attacks, San Diego FBI agent Steven Butler alerted his superiors about a flow of money from Saudi government officials that had made its way into the hands of two of the San Diego-based hijackers, according to U.S. News & World Report. But the warning was ignored.
“Butler is claiming that people [in the FBI] didn’t follow up,” a congressional source told U.S. News & World Report. Another congressional source said Butler "saw a pattern, a trail, and he told his supervisors, but it ended there.”
The investigation into the Saudi government’s alleged connections to the hijackers came to an abrupt stop. Arguably the greatest crime mystery of our time has since become a cold case.
Randall Hamud, the attorney who represented several of the San Diego-based hijackers’ friends as well as the family of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, has always insisted that the Saudis were “given a pass” throughout the 9/11 investigation. “There was overwhelming evidence that the Saudi government was connected to 9/11, but we still let Bayoumi return to Saudi Arabia,” he told me last year. “What more do you need to know?”
And now, on the anniversary of 9/11, as President Obama tries to convince the world that bombing Syria is a good idea, it’s highly unlikely that he will want to ruffle Saudi Arabia’s feathers. He needs all the "friends" he can muster for his unpopular plan.
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