Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Citing not only that officer but other CIA and GID sources, the Trentos have written that Mihdhar and Hazmi—assumed at the time to be friendly double agents—went to the January meeting of terrorists in Kuala Lumpur “to spy on a meeting of top associates of al Qaeda associates.… The CIA/Saudi hope was that the Saudis would learn details of bin Laden’s future plans.”

As noted earlier, the CIA knew even before Mihdhar reached Kuala Lumpur that he had a multiple-entry visa for the United States—a fact it said it discovered when his passport was photographed en route to Malaysia.

The reason the CIA did not ask the State Department to watchlist Mihdhar and Hazmi, according to the Trento account, was that the men “were perceived as working for a friendly intelligence service”—the GID. In any case, the Trentos quote one of their sources as saying that CIA operations staff allowed names to go forward to the watchlist only with reluctance. “Many terrorists act as assets for our case officers,” the source said. “We do deal with bad guys and, like cops protect snitches, we protect ours … none of those guys is going to show up on the no-fly list.”

The reason the FBI was not told anything about Mihdhar and Hazmi, the Trentos quote a source as telling them, was “because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States.”

Then the kicker. According to the Trentos, Mihdhar and Hazmi had not been thoroughly vetted by either the CIA or the GID. “In fact they were triple agents—loyal to Osama bin Laden.” And so it was, months later, that catastrophe followed.

Is this mere disinformation? Early on in his career, Joe Trento worked for the columnist Jack Anderson, famous in his day for breaking big stories, often without naming his sources. He has also worked for CNN. The Trentos have long written on intelligence, and have repeated their claim about the handling of Mihdhar and Hazmi in another book, in a 2010 article, and in a conversation with the authors.

The scenario they paint, though, bumps up against known events and evidence. It seems likely that the Trentos’ intelligence sources fed them morsels of fact mixed in with deliberate disinformation—a common enough ploy. Their account, though, does prompt a much closer look at the interplay between the CIA and the Saudi GID.

The CIA’s own inspector general, reporting in 2005, found that its bin Laden station and “[name redacted] were hostile to each other and working at cross purposes for a number of years before 9/11.” In context, it is clear that the redacted name refers to the GID. Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who, writing later, revealed that—as early as 1997—Alec Station, the CIA unit that specifically targeted bin Laden, had seen its GID counterparts as a “hostile service.”

The signs were, Risen reported, that intelligence given to the GID about al Qaeda was often passed on to al Qaeda. Once CIA staff shared intercepts with the GID, they found, al Qaeda operatives would abruptly stop using the lines that had been monitored. Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report hinted at the true picture. “On some occasions,” one passage read—followed by several redacted lines—“individuals in some [foreign] liaison services are believed to have cooperated with terrorist groups.”

The legal defense fund of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, on trial in the mid-1990s for plotting to bomb New York landmarks, had been supported with GID money. Osama bin Laden himself, who had made his name under GID direction during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, remained a hero for many.

A number of Saudi officials, a friendly intelligence service told the CIA well before 9/11, used bin Laden’s picture as the screen saver on their office computers. Little was to change. Even three years after the attacks—following the shock of serious al Qaeda attacks inside Saudi Arabia, and severe reprisals by the regime—one senior Arab source would still be telling the London Times that Saudi intelligence was “80% sympathetic to al Qaeda.”

In 2001, sympathy for al Qaeda and bin Laden was widespread across the spectrum of Saudi society. It extended, even, to approval of the strikes on America.

THIRTY-THREE

AT FIRST ON SEPTEMBER 11, EARLY ESTIMATES HAD BEEN THAT AS many as tens of thousands might have died in the New York attacks alone. There was a universal sense of catastrophe across the Western world. In Saudi Arabia, as in a number of countries across the region, many expressed delight.

Drivers honked their horns. In Internet cafés, many young men adopted shots of the blazing Twin Towers as screen savers—and restored the photographs if proprietors removed them. Students in class seemed “quite proud.” Some people killed sheep or camels and invited friends to a feast.

Satisfaction over the blow to the United States was not confined to the street. The hostess at a lunch for society women was shocked to hear many of her guests evince the sentiment that, at last, “somebody did something.”

There was a tangible feeling abroad that the attacks had been a good thing, that “someone had stood up to America.” At King Fahd National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, one foreign doctor had a unique insight into the reaction of ordinary patients and medical professionals alike.

Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Muslim of Pakistani origin, had trained in Britain and the United States. Like millions of others, she had spent the hours after the attacks watching satellite television news in horror, phoning friends in New York to ask if they were safe. On arriving at the hospital next morning, though, what she sensed was an atmosphere of “muted exaltation … relish in the face of destruction.”

On the general medical and surgical wards, nurses told her, Saudi patients had clapped and cheered as TV pictures showed the Twin Towers crumbling. What had outraged one fellow foreigner most, though, was when two Saudi obstetricians sent out to the Diplomat Bakery for cakes—the sort of cakes customarily used at moments of mabrouk , when congratulation or celebration is due. When the cakes arrived, they passed out slices to their colleagues and to the patients who had clapped.

“So, they lost thousands of Americans,” a New York–trained Pakistani doctor said. “They are guessing three thousand right now. Do you have any idea how many people die in Palestine every day, Qanta? The loss of these lives is hardly equal to the daily losses of lives in the Muslim world in past years.”

The mood was pervasive and lasting. Later that week, at the grocery in the hospital complex, the man at the checkout was eager as usual to chat. “This news in New York has been very good, Doctora!” he said. And then: “The Americans deserved it.”

A month later, a survey of educated Saudi professionals found that 95 percent of respondents favored bin Laden’s cause. Asked to comment, Crown Prince Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz, opined that this reflected the “feelings of the people against the United States … because of its unflinching support for Israel against the Palestinians.”

Several years later, conducting interviews in Saudi Arabia, 9/11 Commission staff interviewed several dozen young to middle-age men said to be “moderates.” “Almost unanimously,” Commission chairmen Kean and Hamilton noted, the men were “harshly critical of the United States.… They did not defend crashing planes into buildings, but they believed strongly that the United States was unfair in its approach to the Middle East, particularly in its support for Israel.

“These feelings were not surprising, but hearing them firsthand from so-called moderates drove home the enormous gap between how we see ourselves and our actions in the Middle East, and how others perceive us.”