Case of Saudi Ties to 9/11 Hijackers Gets New Life

Court ruling opens door to more discovery in 9/11 family suits against kingdom

It was 24 years ago this month (CNN)

The families of 9/11 victims are planning an aggressive new push to dislodge documents and other evidence from the CIA and FBI in the wake of a milestone court ruling last week allowing them to proceed with their lawsuit alleging Saudi government complicity in the worst terror attack in U.S. history.  

“We intend to open up discovery on every single front,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families.  “We’re going to make this as painful as possible.”

“Let the wheels of justice turn,” added Eagleson, whose father was killed while trying to evacuate colleagues at the World Trade Tower. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted—our day in court.”  

Eagleson spoke to SpyTalk after U.S. Judge George Daniels, in a long awaited ruling, rejected the Saudi government’s motion to dismiss the families’ lawsuit, which was first filed in New York more than two decades ago and has dragged on through seemingly endless court battles ever since. What that means, at a practical level, is that lawyers for the families may soon have new license to seek documents from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies about their knowledge of Saudi funding of terror groups in the years before 9/11 and their concerns about the possible existence of a Saudi-backed “support network” that aided two of the hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, after they flew into Los Angeles in January, 2000 following their attendance at an Al Qaeda planning “summit” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The ruling could also put new pressure on the Saudi government to settle the case in order to avoid embarrassing disclosures that could emerge if the case ever goes to trial. The Saudi Embassy in Washington last week vowed to appeal Daniels’ ruling, a process that could potentially delay the case even further and, for the time being, put off discovery. The cost of any settlement would likely be astronomical, totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, if not more— a considerable sum even for the oil-rich Kingdom. 

“My gut is I think the Saudis are going to throw up their hands and settle out of court,” said one former federal agent who investigated the Saudi role but asked not to be publicly identified because of the ongoing legal case. “Because if this case gets into a jury box, all [the plaintiff’s lawyers] will have to do is show a picture of the planes hitting the tower and [the Saudis] are dead. No lawyer is going to tell the Saudis they will want to adjudicate this before a jury in New York.” 

(Ali Shihabi, a Saudi businessman and commentator who is close to Kingdom officials, dismissed any talk of a settlement, at least for now. “The feeling is we are being bilked by ambulance-chasing lawyers who look at Saudi Arabia as a juicy target,” he said. 

“This is still a long way from a trial. My feeling is the Kingdom is just going to litigate.”)

Evidence Trail

In his carefully worded 45-page opinion, Judge Daniels found there were “multiple pieces of circumstantial evidence” to draw the “reasonable inference” that two Saudis in the United States, Omar Al-Bayoumi, a purported student working for a Saudi aviation company, and Al Fahad Thumairy, imam of the Saudi-funded King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles, were “coordinating with the Saudi government” when they provided substantial assistance to the two hijackers after they arrived in Southern California.

Suspected Saudi asset Omar al-Bayoumi (Internet Archive)

The activities of Bayoumi and Thumairy have been debated publicly—and within the FBI—for years with no conclusive determination as to whether their efforts to assist Al-Mihdhar and Al Hazmi were done with either the knowledge of, or at the direction, of higher level Saudi officials.

But Daniels, in his dissection of the evidence—including voluminous FBI documents that have only become public within the last few years— challenged as implausible the argument long made by Kingdom of Saudi Arabia lawyers that the two Saudis were well-meaning innocents who, acting on their own, were simply trying to assist fellow Muslims who they had never before met adjust to a new country.  

Bayoumi, who at the time was living in San Diego and was in regular contact with the Saudi Embassy, met the two hijackers— supposedly in what he called “an unplanned chance meeting”—at a Mediterranean restaurant in Los Angeles shortly after they first arrived in the country. He then invited them to reach out to him in San Diego, where he found them an apartment, opened up a bank account for them, loaned them money and helped put them in touch with others in the Islamic community, one of whom appears to have been Anwar Al-Aulaqi,  a notorious local imam who was later identified as an Al Qaeda recruiter and was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. 

Daniels noted in his opinion that there was evidence from FBI interviews that Bayoumi’s initial interaction with the hijackers at the restaurant came immediately after he met with officials at the Saudi consulate and then with Thumairy, who according to one witness interviewed by the FBI had instructed a congregant to look after two very “significant” people. (The witness later disputed the FBI account.) 

Throughout a three month period between January 2000 and March of that year, key weeks when Bayoumi was helping the hijackers, FBI records show there were multiple phone calls between him and Thumairy as well as 93 calls between Bayoumi and the Saudi Embassy in Washington, of which 30 were to the embassy’s Islamic Affairs Department. (The phone records also show separate calls in April of that year from Thumairy and Bayoumi’s wife to Aulaqi, the Al Qaeda preacher.) The Saudi lawyers had contended the calls from Bayoumi were about religious matters during the holy month of Ramadan, but Daniels concluded their argument was “unpersuasive given the frequency and timing of the calls, and in particular, how the calls between the relevant individuals seem to follow one after one another during a short relevant time period.”  

U.K. Sojourn

Bayoumi later moved to Great Britain. The judge noted that British police recovered a “note pad”  from Bayoumi ’s garage showing a handwritten sketch of an airplane with jottings of numbers and calculations about the plane’s height and distance. But under British laws at the time, Scotland Yard did not have enough evidence to hold him, so he was allowed to leave the country and return to Saudi Arabia, where, in a deposition with lawyers for the 9/11 families, he disputed much of the FBI evidence and denied any knowledge of what the hijackers were up to. (To the surprise of Eagleson and others, the judge did not impute a sinister motive to a 1999 video Bayoumi had taped in Washington, D.C. showing tourist monuments and prominent buildings, including the U.S. Capitol, which a former top CIA official said he was convinced was a “casing” for the 9/11 terror attack. The video was never made available to FBI agents investigating Bayoumi’s role, prompting one top agent on the 9/11 case to recently tell Sixty Minutes that when he finally saw it as part of the evidence in the families’ lawsuit, “I knew exactly what it was.” Had he seen it in real time, “I would have taken it to the U.S. attorney’s office” for prosecution.) 

In its widely publicized 2004 report, the 9/11 Commission downplayed the idea that Saudi Arabia played any role in the terror attacks, writing that while Thumairy may have been an Islamic radical, there was no evidence he had assisted the hijackers. It also concluded there was “no credible evidence” that Bayoumi “believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

But FBI counterterrorism agents were unconvinced and later launched Operation Encore, a full blown investigation into the activities of the two hijackers, where they uncovered considerable new evidence—including the phone records relied on by Daniels— that had never been seen by the 9/11 Commission. The evidence was still viewed as inconclusive—at least for the purposes of criminal charges that could meet “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards—and the case was effectively closed by 2016, when FBI counterterrorism officials were most focused on destroying ISIS, deemed at the time to be the more pressing issue.  But while President Biden later declassified many of the Operation Encore documents, Daniels’s decision means the plaintiff’s lawyers will now be free to seek interviews with FBI agents and their underlying notes and analyses—assuming Daniels permits discovery to proceed even if the Saudis file their promised appeal. Eagleson said the families’ lawyers will file a motion urging the judge, given the passage of time, not to block discovery during an appeal. 

Saudi Spy?

One FBI document sure to be of interest as the case proceeds is one suggesting Bayoumi was an “informant” for Saudi intelligence, who reported to Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador, about “persons of interest” in Southern California. 

“In the late 1990’s and up to September 11, 2001, Omar Albayoumi [sic] was paid a monthly stipend as a cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) via then Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan Alsaud,” reads one portion of a heavily redacted FBI document in 2017 from the Washington Field Office that appears to be related to potential counterintelligence issues raised by Operation Encore. “The information Albyoumi obtained on persons of interest in the Saudi community in Los Angeles and San Diego and other issues, which met certain GIP intelligence requirements, would be forwarded to Bandar. Bandar would then inform the GIP of items of interest to the GIP for further investigation/vetting or follow up.” 

The source of the information about Bandar is redacted in the document released under Biden’s executive order. Bandar, once one of Washington’s most influential diplomats, with especially close ties to President George W. Bush and his father, is now back in Saudi Arabia and has declined to be interviewed by the lawyers for the 9/11 families.

A renewed focus on the support for al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could prove even more awkward for the CIA, reminding the public of what was widely viewed, including by the 9/11 Commission, as arguably the most serious intelligence failure in the run-up to 9/11. Working with Malaysian special services, the agency had actually tracked al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi during the Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 and was aware they both flew to the United States some weeks later.

But in a lapse that has never been fully explained, agency counterterrorism officials failed to alert the FBI to their presence in the country. This has led to still percolating conspiracy theories — currently being promoted by media provocateur Tucker Carlson but previously endorsed by former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke— that the CIA deliberately withheld information about the hijackers because — according to some versions — the agency expected the Saudis to keep tabs on them or even recruit them, which apparently never took place. (CIA officials have adamantly denied such accounts.)  

“This could get very very awkward for people,” said the former federal agent who has investigated the 9/11 case.  “Everybody who is anybody wants this to go away.”