Did the Saudis know about 9/11?

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are key U.S. partners in the war on terror, particularly Pakistan, which aided in the capture of Zubaydah and other top al-Qaida agents after 9/11. Both countries are also vital to U.S. interests for other reasons: Saudi Arabia because of its oil and its religious and political centrality in the Arab-Muslim world, Pakistan as Afghanistan's neighbor and a member of the nuclear club. But both are highly problematic allies. Radical Islamists hold significant power in Pakistan (particularly in the ISI, and in its lawless northwestern provinces), and President Musharraf's regime must walk a fine line between placating the Americans and not enraging its citizens. The U.S. has a much longer and stronger, but also troubled, alliance with Saudi Arabia, which has promoted its hard-line Wahhabi sect of Islam around the world and spawned 15 of the 19 hijackers -- but also pumps much of the oil that drives the global economy.

Posner is careful not to unequivocally endorse Zubaydah's claims, but he believes that the fact that four of the five named officials suddenly died (with the exception of the highest ranking one, Prince Turki) is powerful evidence that his story is largely true. "Zubaydah's interrogation leaves some questions unanswered which I think will eventually be run to ground," he says. "He's recanted his story. He's said he just picked these names out of a hat to spare himself some torture. But is it possible that he picked out three Saudi princes and the head of the Pakistani air force, and then they all just had the bad luck of dying -- the three Saudis within days of each other -- after the U.S. shared the information? And from a blood clot, a car wreck, dehydration and a plane crash? I guess technically it's possible. People do win the lottery. But as I view it, it's extremely unlikely."

The fact that Prince Turki is still alive would seem to weaken the idea there was foul play behind the three other Saudi princes' deaths. But Posner speculates that the longtime intelligence chief, who was dismissed from his post just 10 days before 9/11, was untouchable: "He's the J. Edgar Hoover of Saudi Arabia. If anybody has all the goods on the highest members of the royal family -- their sex lives, their use of prostitutes when they visit Europe, etc. -- it's him."

It's also possible that Turki himself, if accusations of his close ties to al-Qaida have any merit, could be involved in a coverup of the Zubaydah interrogation.

Turki, in fact, did have friendly contacts with radical Islamist groups, including Afghan jihadis fighting the Soviets in the 1980s and later with the Taliban, over a protracted period of time. "If anyone made payments to bin Laden and al-Qaida, it would be Turki, given his connections to them through the '80s," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer who did extensive tours in the Mideast and Central Asia during his 21-year career and is the author of "Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude." "Turki arranged for things like sending cars to the Taliban, and free gas for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he supported the Islamic movement in Sudan -- it was his job. But I've never seen any evidence that Turki himself was complicit in terrorism."

Another possibility is that Zubaydah's story is partly false but contains elements of truth. Posner speculates that some members of the Saudi royal family who may have once supported bin Laden later became horrified by his terrorist atrocities -- only to find themselves trapped, unable to reveal what they knew about him and his plans (perhaps including even the 9/11 plot) without implicating themselves.

Posner has a reputation for skepticism; he has authored books debunking conspiracy theories about the Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK assassinations (he concurred with the Warren report that Oswald acted alone). He says that his anonymous sources may have regarded him, as a book writer, as a safer choice for a leak than an intelligence reporter with a major byline. "Washington is a very small town in terms of sources. If you're a Robert Novak or a Sy Hersh people know the circles you hang out in. It narrows the hunt for the leaker by a wide margin."

And Posner reiterated to Salon he has full confidence in his unnamed sources, in part because of their partisan agenda: "Both of them clearly believe this information is true and should be public because the Saudis have not been our allies for a long time and they should be out," he says. "I have no doubt from my conversations that there's a split inside the administration. The majority opinion was this story came from the mouth of a terrorist who would say anything to save his skin. It's known that Zubaydah has lied about other things. So why should this information become public now, if we aren't even sure it's correct that these [Saudi and Pakistani] government officials were involved? But there's a minority view in the administration that the Saudis are no longer an ally, and I'm convinced my sources believe the story to be true."

Posner further argues it's implausible his anonymous sources would have made the story up out of whole cloth, since they would know that U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of the Zubaydah debriefing could come forward and refute the story.

But several analysts are dubious or outright dismissive of the entire claim. "It just simply does not make sense. To have been involved in 9/11 would've been the House of Saud committing suicide," says Sandra Mackey, a Middle East scholar who's published several books on the region, including a study of Saudi Arabia. "Are there people in the House of Saud who might be connected to al-Qaida? Quite possibly. I wouldn't be surprised. But that's considerably different than saying the central leadership conspired with al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is their greatest enemy."

Saudi Arabia's relationship with al-Qaida is complex and has changed considerably over time. After the first Gulf War, Mackey says, the Saudis were essentially in denial: They kicked bin Laden out of the kingdom, but cut a deal with him in which they would look the other way -- and even provide financial support -- if the Saudi national would agree to leave the kingdom alone. They didn't grasp how serious a threat he posed.

Mackey says the Saudis were caught "flat-footed" by 9/11. They were shocked, and fearful their deep relationship with Washington would be damaged, but were slow to act. There was huge public sympathy for bin Laden, who was seen as a heroic militant Islamist battling the West, and the regime had no will to confront the potentially explosive Saudi street.

Finally came the May 2003 al-Qaida bombings in Riyadh, in which more Saudi civilians were killed than Americans. Mackey sees this attack as a watershed event, one that forced the Saudi rulers to realize they were in a fight for survival against militant Islam. To some degree, the serious attack on their own soil gave the Saudis the political capital to take aggressive action.

Subsequent running gun battles around the country, and the discovery of large weapons caches, have revealed a widespread al-Qaida presence in the kingdom. A number of Saudi military and police have died in these battles, and a number of al-Qaida members have been killed or captured since May. But the Saudis continue to thwart a U.S. investigation of the terrorist paper trail inside the kingdom, and have not handed over suspects or allowed U.S. authorities to interrogate them.

Gregory Gause, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the University of Vermont, says that although the Saudi ruling elite displayed a pattern of "willful ignorance" toward al-Qaida through much of the 1990s, he doesn't see any convincing evidence indicating its complicity in terrorism. He points to an attack on the Saudi Arabian National Guard office in Riyadh on Nov. 13, 1995, in which five Americans were killed. The perpetrators arrested and executed by the Saudi government, Gause says, were known to be al-Qaida sympathizers. "The top levels of the regime, including Prince Turki, would be extremely leery of any kind of political deal with al-Qaida when al-Qaida had already attacked inside the kingdom, and the al-Qaida leadership was openly calling for the overthrow of the Saudi regime."

"If the Saudis were more deeply involved in al-Qaida [operations], I think you would expect to have seen some different behavior from the Saudi government after the East Africa embassy and USS Cole bombings," says Gause. The 1998 al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania led Turki, according to his own account, to deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban during his known 1998 meeting with the Afghan rulers, in which he demanded, unsuccessfully, that they hand bin Laden over. "If the princes were working with al-Qaida," Gause says, "I think you would've seen more direct Saudi contact with the Taliban after that, and I'm not aware of evidence of any high-level [Saudi] visitors there."

As for the Pakistani connection, Mary Anne Weaver, author of "Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan," agrees that it's quite plausible elements in the Pakistani government could have been involved with al-Qaida, given the long-standing presence of militant Islamists inside the country. But she's seen no evidence connecting Pakistan to the 9/11 plot. "I did a huge amount of interviewing for my book, and even with the people who were the most antagonistic toward the Musharraf government, nobody mentioned even the remote possibility that Pakistan had been at all complicit in Sept. 11 in a specific way. I've heard nothing about government officials knowing in advance that something was going to happen, even if they didn't know what or where."

More specifically, Weaver is dubious about the claim that Mir could have been an al-Qaida supporter. Weaver admits that several friends she knows from the country's political elite who knew Mir "very well" are perplexed by his death, but says that they had no indication he was involved in anything related to terrorism. Moreover, she says the fact that Mir was from the air force makes it less likely he was hooked up with militant Islamists in the ISI. "It's the Pakistani army that really runs the country -- the nine corps commanders, and [its security branch] the ISI. It's really a nation within the state. The air force and the navy aren't as important or influential. I've never met anybody from the ISI who hasn't been from the army."

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