[Mb-civic] The Biggest Crime in American History and Planes are Grounded. Yet the House of Saud Gets Safe Passage Home.

[Michael Butler]

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    The Biggest Crime in American History
    and Planes are Grounded. Yet the
    House of Saud Gets Safe Passage Home.
    By Craig Unger 
    The Independent on Sunday U.K.

     Sunday 18 July 2004
 The ties between the Bush family and the Saudi royals are revealed in a
hard-hitting new book by Craig Unger, a key source for Michael Moore's film
'Fahrenheit 9/11'. Here we print an exclusive extract.

    It was the second Wednesday of September 2001. Terrorist attacks had
grounded all commercial and private aviation throughout the entire United
States for the first time in history. Former vice-president Al Gore was
stranded in Austria because his flight to the United States was cancelled.
Former president Bill Clinton was stuck in Australia. Major League Baseball
games were postponed. American skies were nearly as empty as they had been
when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. America was paralysed by
terror, and for 48 hours, virtually no one could fly.

     No one, that is, except for the Saudis. [In Washington] Prince Bandar
bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United
States, was orchestrating the exodus of more than 140 Saudis scattered
throughout the country. They included members of two families: One was the
royal House of Saud, the family that ruled the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and
which, thanks to the country's vast oil reserves, was without question the
richest family in the world. The other family was the Sauds' close friends
and allies, the Bin Ladens, who in addition to owning a multibillion-dollar
construction conglomerate had spawned the notorious terrorist Osama bin
Laden.

     At 52, Prince Bandar had long been the most recognisable figure from
his country in America. Widely known as the Arab Gatsby, with his trimmed
goatee and tailored double-breasted suits, Bandar was the very embodiment of
the contradictions inherent in being a modern, jet-setting, Western-leaning
member of the royal House of Saud.

     Profane, flamboyant, and cocksure, Bandar entertained lavishly at his
spectacular estates all over the world. When it came to embracing the
culture of the infidel West, Bandar outdid even the most ardent admirers of
Western civilisation - that was him patrolling the sidelines of Dallas
Cowboys football games with his friend Jerry Jones, the team's owner. To
militant Islamic fundamentalists who loathed pro-West multibillionaire Saudi
royals, no one fit the bill better than Bandar.

     And yet, his guise as Playboy of the Western World notwithstanding,
deep in his bones, Prince Bandar was a key figure in the world of Islam. His
father, defence minister Prince Sultan, was second in line to the Saudi
crown, Bandar was the nephew of King Fahd, the ageing Saudi monarch, and the
grandson of the late king Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia,
who initiated his country's historic oil-for-security relationship with the
US when he met Franklin D Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on
14 February, 1945. The enormous royal family in which Bandar played such an
important role oversaw two of the most sacred places of Islamic worship, the
holy mosques in Medina and Mecca.

     Now, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the ugly seams of the
relationship [between the US and the House of Saud] had been laid bare.
Because thousands of innocent people had been killed and most of the killers
were said to be Saudi, it was up to Bandar, ever the master illusionist, to
assure Americans that everything was just fine between the US and Saudi
Arabia. Bandar had always been a smooth operator, but now he and his
unflappable demeanour would be tested as never before.

     Bandar desperately hoped that early reports of the Saudi role had been
exaggerated - after all, al-Qa'ida terrorist operatives were known to use
false passports. But at 10pm on the evening of 12 September, about 36 hours
after the attack, a high-ranking CIA official - according to Newsweek
magazine, it was probably CIA director George Tenet - phoned Bandar at his
home and gave him the bad news: 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.
Afterward, Bandar said: "I felt as if the Twin Towers had just fallen on my
head." Public relations had never been more crucial for the Saudis. Bandar
swiftly retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller to place newspaper ads all over
the country condemning the attacks and dissociating Saudi Arabia from them.

     But Osama bin Laden was Saudi, of course, and he was not just any
Saudi. The Bin Ladens were one of a handful of extremely wealthy families
that were so close to the House of Saud that they effectively acted as
extensions of the royal family.

     Like Bandar, the Bin Laden family epitomised the marriage between the
United States and Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction company, the Saudi
Binladin Group (SBG), banked with Citigroup and invested with Goldman Sachs
and Merrill Lynch. [The family company and various family members use the
spelling Binladin rather than Bin Laden, the spelling most frequently used
for Osama.] Over time, the Bin Ladens did business with such icons of
Western culture as Disney, the Hard Rock Café, Snapple and Porsche. In the
mid-Nineties, they joined various members of the House of Saud in becoming
business associates with former secretary of state James Baker and former
president George Bush by investing in the Carlyle Group, a gigantic
Washington, DC-based private equity firm. As Charles Freeman, the former US
ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told The Wall Street Journal: "If there were
ever any company closely connected to the US and its presence in Saudi
Arabia, it's the Saudi Binladin Group."

     The Bin Ladens and members of the House of Saud who spent time in the
United States were mostly young professionals and students attending high
school or college. Many lived in the Boston area, thanks to its high
concentration of colleges. One of at least four members of the family to
have the name Abdullah bin Laden, a young brother of Osama, was a 1994
graduate of Harvard Law School and had offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

     Several Bin Ladens had attended Tufts University, near Boston. Two Bin
Ladens - Mohammed and Nawaf - owned units in the Flagship Wharf condominium
complex in Charlestown Navy Yard on Boston Harbor. Some of the young, chic,
sophisticated members of the family appeared even more Westernised than
Bandar. Wafah Binladin, a 26-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, lived
in a $6,000-a-month rented loft in New York's fashionable SoHo and was
considering pursuing a singing career. As for the Saudi royal family, many
of them were scattered all over the United States.

     Shortly after the attack, one of the Bin Ladens, an unnamed brother of
Osama's, frantically called the Saudi embassy in Washington seeking
protection. He was given a room at the Watergate Hotel and told not to open
the door. King Fahd, the ageing and infirm Saudi monarch, sent a message to
his emissaries in Washington. "Take measures to protect the innocents," he
said. Meanwhile, a Saudi prince sent a directive to the Tampa Police
Department in Florida that young Saudis who were close to the royal family
and went to school in the area were in potential danger.

     Bandar went to work immediately. If any foreign official had the clout
to pull strings at the White House in the midst of a grave national security
crisis, it was he. A senior member of the Washington diplomatic corps,
Bandar had played racquetball with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the
late Seventies. He had run covert operations for the late CIA director Bill
Casey that were so hush-hush they were kept secret even from President
Ronald Reagan. He was the man who had stashed away 30 locked attaché cases
that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. And for two
decades, Bandar had built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush
family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.

     All over the country, members of the extended Bin Laden family, the
House of Saud, and their associates were assembling in various locations. At
least eight planes were available for their transportation. Officially, the
FBI says that it had nothing to do with the repatriation of the Saudis.

     "I can say unequivocally that the FBI had no role in facilitating these
flights one way or another," says Special Agent John Iannarelli.

     Bandar, however, characterised the role of the FBI very differently.
"With coordination with the FBI," he said on CNN, "we got them all out."
Meanwhile, the Saudis had at least two of the planes on call to repatriate
the Bin Ladens. One of them began picking up family members all across the
country. Starting in Los Angeles on an undetermined date, it flew first to
Orlando, Florida, where Khalil Binladin, a sibling of Osama bin Laden's,
boarded. From Orlando, the plane continued to Dulles International Airport
outside Washington, before going on to Logan Airport in Boston on 19
September, picking up members of the Bin Laden family along the way.

     As the planes prepared for take-off at each location across the
country, the FBI repeatedly got into disputes with Rihab Massoud, Bandar's
chargé d'affaires at the Saudi embassy in Washington. "I recall getting into
a big flap with Bandar's office about whether they would leave without us
knowing who was on the plane," said one former agent who participated in the
repatriation of the Saudis. "Bandar wanted the plane to take off and we were
stressing that that plane was not leaving until we knew exactly who was on
it." In the end, the FBI was able to check papers and identify everyone on
the flights. Spokesmen for the FBI assert that the Saudis had every right to
leave the country.

     The top brass at Logan Airport [in Boston] did not know what was going
on. The FBI's counterterrorism unit should have been a leading force in the
domestic battle against terror, but here it was not even going to interview
the Saudis. [One private jet landed at Logan to pick up more members of the
Bin Laden family who wanted to leave.] On September 19, under the cover of
darkness, they did.

     The Bin Laden family had expressed "the strongest denunciation and
condemnation" [of the attacks]. A persuasive case could be made that it was
against the interests of the royal family and the Bin Ladens to have aided
the terrorists. On the other hand, this was the biggest crime in American
history. How is it possible that Saudis were allowed to fly, even when all
of America, FBI agents included, was grounded? Had the White House approved
the operation - and, if so, why?

     When Bandar arrived at the White House on Thursday September 13, 2001,
he and President Bush retreated to the Truman Balcony, a casual outdoor spot
behind the pillars of the South Portico that also provided a bit of privacy.

     The two men lit up Cohiba cigars and began to discuss how they would
work together in the war on terror. Bush said that the United States would
hand over any captured al-Qa'ida operatives to the Saudis if they would not
cooperate. The implication was clear: the Saudis could use any means
necessary - including torture - to get the suspects to talk.

     But the larger points went unspoken. The two men were scions of the
most powerful dynasties in the world. The Bush family and its close
associates - the House of Bush, if you will - included two presidents of the
United States; former secretary of state James Baker, who had been a
powerful figure in four presidential administrations; key figures in the oil
and defence industries, the Carlyle Group, and the Republican Party; and
much, much more. As for Bandar, his family effectively was the government of
Saudi Arabia, the most powerful country in the Arab world. They had hundreds
of billions of dollars and the biggest oil reserves in the world. The
relationship was unprecedented. Never before had a president of the United
States - much less, two presidents from the same family - had such close
personal and financial ties to the ruling family of another foreign power.

     Yet few Americans realised that these two dynasties, the Bush family
and the House of Saud, had a history dating back more than 20 years. Not
just business partners and personal friends, the Bushes and the Saudis had
pulled off elaborate covert operations and gone to war together. They had
shared secrets that involved unimaginable personal wealth, spectacular
military might, the richest energy resources in the world.

     They had been involved in the Iran-contra scandal, and in secret US aid
in the Afghanistan war that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. Along with then
vice-president Bush, the Saudis has joined the United States in supporting
the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for seven full years after knowing
that he had used weapons of mass destruction.

     In the private sector, the Saudis had supported George W Bush's
struggling oil company, Harken Energy, and in the Nineties they made common
cause with his father by investing in the Carlyle Group. In the 1991 Gulf
War, the Saudis and the elder Bush had fought side by side. And now there
was the repatriation of the Bin Ladens, which could not have taken place
without approval at the highest levels of the executive branch of President
George W Bush's administration.

     Only Bush and Bandar know what transpired that day on the Truman
Balcony. But the ties between the two families were so strong that allowing
the Saudis to leave America would not have been difficult for Bush. It would
also have been in character with a relationship in which decisions were
often made through elaborate and contrived deniability mechanisms that
allowed the principals to turn a blind eye to unseemly realities and to be
intentionally "out of the loop". The ties between the two families were an
open secret that in some ways was as obvious as the proverbial elephant in
the living room. Yet at the same time it was somehow hard to discern even
for the most seasoned journalists.

     Perhaps that was because the relationship had been forged all over the
globe and arced across different eras - from the Reagan-Bush years to the
Clinton administration to the presidency of George W Bush.

     To understand its scope and its meaning, one would have to search
through tens of thousands of forgotten newspaper stories, read scores of
books by journalists and historians, and study myriad "secret" classified
documents and the records of barely remembered congressional probes of
corporate intrigue and Byzantine government scandals. One would have to
journey back in the time to the birth of al-Qa'ida at the terrorist training
camps during the Afghanistan war. One would have to study the Iran-Iraq War
of the Eighties, the 1991 Gulf War, and the Iraq War of 2003. One would have
to try to deduce what had happened within the corporate suites of oil barons
in Dallas and Houston, in the executive offices of the Carlyle Group, in the
Situation Room of the White House, and in the grand royal palaces of Saudi
billionaires. One would have to interview scores of politicians, oil
executives, counterterrorism analysts, CIA operatives and businessmen from
Washington and Saudi Arabia and Texas. One would have to decipher
brilliantly hidden agendas and purposefully murky corporate relationships.

     Finally, one would have to put all this information together to shape a
continuum, a narrative in which the House of Bush and the House of Saud
dominated the world stage together in one era after another. Having done so,
one would come to a singular inescapable conclusion: namely, that,
horrifying as it sounds, the secret relationship between these two great
families helped to trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of
9/11.

  

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