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Behind the Scenes: Saving the Saudis
Craig Unger's article in the current issue of Vanity Fair called "Saving the Saudis" shows what happens when a source demonstrates moral courage. Numerous articles and documents cited by Unger originated with the work of the National Security News Service. NSNS's reporters would not have been able to provide such assistance without the help of brave people from the FBI, U.S. Customs, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA.
Much is made in the article about a sheaf of secret FBI documents. Those documents appeared on NSNS's conference table after a meeting with government agents in the dark week after the 9-11 attacks. The agents were seeking NSNS's help in a matter related to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The agents may have left the documents by accident, but NSNS staff is skeptical. The documents were secret FBI reports about an investigation of members of the bin Laden family in the United States during the 1990s. Some of us at NSNS suspect that the FBI field agents who had been looking into these matters and developing sources among the al-Qaeda membership where shocked when the White House defended the CIA intelligence failures and let the FBI take the brunt of the blame. Leaving the documents behind may have been an attempt by some brave FBI agents to expose the truth. This war between the FBI and CIA over terrorism is one of the most costly episodes of bureaucratic infighting in American history.
The CIA's coziness to Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the head of Saudi intelligence, actually prevented the FBI from doing its job — arresting criminals. This nonsense had been going on for years when 9-11 took place.
Recently, NSNS reporters met with one of FBI counter-terrorism chief John O'Neill's best agents, who had journeyed to Saudi Arabia to arrest a member of al-Qaeda for illegal money transfers. The agent walked into the meeting in the Saudi capital and watched CIA officers share top-secret spy satellite photography and documents with Prince Turki's deputies. "I felt like the odd man out," the agent said. When the Saudis asked what they could do for the FBI agent, the agent said he wanted to take a Saudi citizen into custody for illegal wire transfers. Before the Saudis could protest, CIA representatives expressed outrage that an FBI agent wanted to arrest this terrorist. The FBI agent went home empty handed. The CIA, it seems, is more interested in protecting Saudi terrorists than in arresting them.
This is especially disturbing since it is now known that the Saudi intelligence service and the Pakistani service kept up communications with top bin Laden aides until the spring prior to the 9-11 attacks. That information was withheld from the congressional joint inquiry even though both the Bush White House and CIA were aware of it. Prince Turki resigned as head of the Saudi intelligence service and became the Saudi ambassador to the Court of St. James in the aftermath of 9-11.
The truth is, only a handful of FBI agents, most of them in New York, ever understood the Saudi terrorist threat. One person who did not fathom it, nor did anything to try to stem it, was then-FBI Director Louis Freeh. Between George Tenet's coziness with Prince Turki and Saudi intelligence and Louis Freeh's refusal to understand the threat his agents were trying to explain, the United States was left wide open. One agent told NSNS that there was a huge cultural gap between counter-terrorism agents and Freeh, who was fascinated by organized crime but uninterested in the tedious work of chasing potential terrorists. The same discomfort Freeh had about Bill Clinton's personal behavior affected his view of John O'Neill, according to a former FBI official who worked for Freeh. O'Neill was married, yet had three girlfriends and was constantly in debt from an expensive lifestyle. "There was a sense that Freeh did not take O'Neill seriously because of the way he ran his personal life," according to the former FBI official.
The Craig Unger article in Vanity Fair, which cites some of NSNS's earlier work, demonstrates the effectiveness of NSNS and the talented journalists with whom we work. NSNS reporter David Armstrong did original work in the 1990s on President Bush's connections to Saudi executives who invested in Bush's unsuccessful oil ventures. Armstrong also developed government sources close to the now quashed Greenquest investigation, which examined the charities that helped pay for bin Laden's murderous activities.
In August 2001, one month before the FBI documents appeared in our office, NSNS reporter Sarah Banner had noticed that Republican advocate Grover Norquist, best known for his work on tax reform and missile defense, was also running a non-profit Islamic advocacy group. In June 2001, Norquist had proudly taken credit in the American Spectator for using his Islamic Free Market Institute to turn out the Muslim vote in Florida — an effort, he said, that helped put George Bush over the top. NSNS staff was amazed to find connections between Norquist's Islamic Institute, a former business partner of President Bush, and several charities under investigation for ties to al-Qaeda. These discoveries, along with Armstrong's investigation of Bush's previous Saudi connections, all went to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and BBC soon after 9-11.
NSNS is continuing its investigation, uncovering new and exciting leads. Expect to see more from NSNS on the FBI's and CIA's roles in the terrorism war both at www.publicedcenter.org and in the national and international media.