Hiding Intelligence that Matters

By Laura Rozen, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2004.

Bob Graham's new book contains two explosive charges: one, Omar al-Bayoumi, a man who helped settle two of the 9/11 hijackers in San Diego was really a Saudi spy; two, the White House has directed what amounts to a cover up of the intelligence failures connected to the 9/11 attacks.

If the charges sound familiar, it's because they are based on facts uncovered by the Congressional Joint Inquiry that the Florida senator co-chaired, and whose findings were released in a report in the summer of 2003. At the time, the White House refused to declassify 27 pages of that report, which allegedly dealt with financial and logistical support that some of the hijackers may have received from Saudi sources.

But Graham goes further in connecting the dots than the report in the book, which is titled "Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror." He claims that Omar al-Bayoumi – who offered assistance to two of the 9/11 hijackers – was likely a full fledged Saudi spy:

Al-Bayoumi … was a Saudi national, serving his nation as a spy. [His] responsibility was to keep an eye on Saudis in San Diego … Once the future terrorists arrive in San Diego, the spy holds a dinner in their honor, introduces them to like-minded individuals, helps them procure official identification, and made the initial payments for their apartment.

That spy, Omar al-Bayoumi, describes their meeting as coincidental … Except that we had now discovered that al-Bayoumi wasn't just acting out of the goodness of his heart – in the five months that Khalid al-Mihdhar spent in San Diego and the ten months that Nawaf al-Hazmi spent there, al-Bayoumi's income rose in conjunction with his support for them, and that increase comes from two sources, a Saudi government contractor and a member of the Saudi royal family … On September 11, America was not attacked by a nation-state, but we had just discovered that the attackers were actively supported by one, and that state was our supposed friend and ally Saudi Arabia.

But for all the material included in Graham's book, he fails to prove decisively that Bayoumi had any advanced knowledge of the hijacking plot itself. Indeed, the independent 9/11 Commission, which interviewed Bayoumi in Saudi Arabia, suggests that the two 9/11 hijackers in question also suspected him of spying for the Saudis and therefore tried to keep their distance.

As such, "Intelligence Matters" raises questions about intelligence on some of the fifteen Saudi hijackers that elements of the Saudi government may have possessed prior to the 9/11 attacks, but fails to deliver any firm conclusions that could incriminate the Saudi government.

More significant is the book's suggestion that a shadowy and coordinated support network within the United States helped the terrorists carry out the attacks. Graham reveals how neither the FBI nor the CIA has yet to provide satisfactory information on this network of sleeper "helpers," who were embedded in communities across the country in order to provide logistical support for the hijackers. They included among others the San Diego imam, Answar Aulaqi, who followed three of the 9/11 hijackers to northern Virginia in the summer of 2001 and Yemeni student Mohdar Abdullah.

Graham is worried that the U.S. intelligence community does not have a full handle on the degree to which the country may have already been infiltrated by agents of future attacks and their support networks. In an interview this week with the newspaper The Forward, Graham went further in his allegations claiming that there are more agents of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group active in Lebanon, than those of al Qaeda within the country today.

Graham clearly has cause to be concerned about the state of U.S. intelligence. For example, the Congressional Joint Inquiry faced fierce resistance from the FBI, and ultimately the White House, when it tried to gain access to an Indian-born Muslim retired San Diego State University English professor who had rented a room in his San Diego suburban home to one of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi. The reason: the professor, Abdussattar Shaikh, was a paid FBI informant at the very time that al-Hazmi was living in his home.

Laura Rozen reports on national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C. for the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, Tom Paine, and other media, and for her weblog, War and Piece.

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