Did the Saudis know about 9/11?

Vince Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism unit, dismisses the Zubaydah theory as part of a disinformation campaign. "My view is this didn't come from inside the [active] intelligence community, but from an administration source, a neoconservative who's promoting it, who also provided a former CIA officer for confirmation." He also says intelligence that's since come to light contradicts Zubaydah's story. "We know a great deal about the training, planning, and operational details of 9/11 now that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is in custody and is talking. He's the key person here, the person who orchestrated 9/11. Abu Zubaydah was not. I doubt Posner had access to the Zubaydah debriefing, though one of his sources probably did. But the point is, none of his sources had access to the debriefing on the person who is the key figure here." Without going into details, Cannistraro said that Mohammed's account contradicted Zubaydah's.

"I don't buy the idea that a serving case officer involved in the Zubaydah debriefing leaked this information," Cannistraro adds. "To me that would be an extraordinary act: It's too great a risk. [CIA officers] have to take polygraphs, and internal leaks are taken very seriously -- people lose their jobs, their careers. It's not like working at the Department of Agriculture -- or at the White House, apparently, where you can blow someone out of the water out of pure vindictiveness."

Cannistraro is equally dismissive of the idea that the sudden, odd deaths of the four officials indicates foul play. "Anything can be made to look [conspiratorial] when you start putting together a number of things that might otherwise be random in nature. Were these deaths [perpetrated] by an embarrassed royal family that didn't want the [Zubaydah] information to get out? That's just a little bit far-fetched," he says flatly.

Robert Baer agrees it would be possible for someone with access to classified information to smear the Saudis. "If you gave me all the al-Qaida interrogations, I could go through them if I wanted to and cherry-pick stuff that [collectively] could destroy relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S.," he says. But he doesn't believe figures inside the Bush administration would want to do so. "People I know [close to] the administration who follow this tell me that the administration is [ultimately] behind Saudi Arabia. Not because of the Bush family relations with the royal family, but because it's the pin that holds together the Gulf, and therefore our economy."

Baer believes that there could indeed be an al-Qaida-Saudi conspiracy, involving radical elements within the extended royal family. "With all the arrests there since the May 12 bombing in Riyadh, what the Saudis have learned to their dismay is that bin Laden has a lot of support in the government and the royal family. It's such a huge family, and there are a lot of princes who resent everything about the West. The Saudi [rulers] have now said openly that they're in a battle for their lives, and they know they have enemies embedded throughout the family," he says. "Call them what you will -- terrorists, Arab nationalists, crazies -- they're in the police, the army and the government."

In fact, Baer makes an assertion startlingly similar to Posner's. "My information is that [investigators there] were blown away when they started arresting all these people. They found cellphones... and [those arrested] had the numbers to call into the command center of the ministry of the interior."

Posner's charges have made little official impact, but they come at a critical -- and strained -- moment in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Ever since 9/11, there has been a growing drum roll of anger and resentment against the conservative kingdom and America's alliance with it. Pundits -- some but not all of them right-wing -- have attacked Saudi Arabia, as well as lawmakers including Sen. Bob Graham,D-Fla., and Sen. Charles Schumer,D-N.Y. The censored 9/11 report released by Congress in late July, which many suspect implicates the Saudis more deeply, has only added fuel to that fire.

Clearly trying to improve their tattered image in the U.S., the Saudi government made a major move on Friday, divulging for the first time the full extent of their cooperation with the U.S. war on terrorism since 1997. Among other favors, the Saudis, at Vice President Dick Cheney's request, facilitated the extradition of an al-Qaida member from Yemen to Jordan, where U.S. officials were able to interrogate him.

U.S. officials confirmed most of the Saudi claims, according to the Associated Press, to whom the Saudis had released the information.

The most intriguing and controversial claim, however, involved none other than the alleged key Saudi conspirator, former intelligence chief Prince Turki. Turki claimed his intelligence service warned the CIA in late 1999 and early 2000 about two al-Qaida members, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were later among the Sept. 11 hijackers. "What we told them was these people were on our watch list from previous activities of al-Qaida, in both the embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle arms into the kingdom in 1997," Turki told the Associated Press.

The CIA denied receiving any such information from Saudi Arabia until after 9/11, and Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., admitted that "no documents" were sent. But Turki insisted his agency communicated the warning to the CIA, at least by word of mouth.

Saudi officials said they had not made their cooperation public previously because they were worried about hostile reaction from their citizenry and other Middle East countries.

But anti-Saudi hard-liners are not likely to be swayed by this new Saudi campaign. Frank Gaffney, president of the right-wing Center for Security Policy in Washington, takes a hard line in assessing the range of options open to America: "You can break off diplomatic relations, you can impose economic sanctions, and you have, ultimately, the option of seizing the oil fields militarily if you have to," he told Time magazine in September. Such views are still considered unacceptable in official circles: When an analyst invited by powerful neoconservative Richard Perle gave a similar virulently anti-Saudi briefing to a Pentagon advisory group in July 2002, the Bush administration was quickly forced to distance itself. But a push to turn confrontational with the Saudi regime has gained more traction since 9/11 and with the ascension of the neoconservatives, ardent supporters of Israel who despise Saudi Arabia both for its support of radical Islamists and of militant Palestinian groups.

Indeed, almost immediately after 9/11, administration hawks including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney began openly promoting a long-held vision for reshaping the Middle East, with the war on Saddam the opening gambit. By opening Iraq's massive oil reserves to the West, America would be less dependent on the Saudis, and the new U.S. military presence in Iraq would allow U.S. troops to withdraw from Saudi Arabia -- which in fact has already largely taken place.

Analysts of all ideological stripes welcomed that withdrawal, as U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia were increasingly viewed as a dangerous political liability. (One of bin Laden's major grievances, after all, was the presence of U.S. troops on sacred Saudi Arabian soil.) And most would agree that the U.S. relationship with the Saudis needs to be reevaluated, stressing the need (as "Threatening Storm" author Kenneth Pollack did in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times) for the U.S. to encourage the kingdom to reform its autocratic, stagnant ways.

But for the U.S. to attempt to destabilize the Saudi regime as part of a broader endgame of U.S. hegemony in the region would be highly risky, experts say.

"This is all extremely serious. These people [neoconservative advocates of breaking with Saudi Arabia] are playing with not only American military security, but with our economic security," says Sandra Mackey. "It leads to the same question we're already facing with Iraq: What comes next? The Saudi regime may be a house of cards, but at least it's a house. If it topples, who's going to take over and be able to hold this region together? Some [in Washington] say, 'We'll just give the religious fundamentalists Mecca and Medina, and the only thing we really need to worry about is securing the oil-producing areas.' It's the same sort of fallacious thinking that got us into Iraq. The neoconservatives are painting a picture to look how they want it to look, rather than seeing what the reality is."

Robert Baer, while taking a darker view of Saudi complicity with al-Qaida than Mackey does, agrees with her that the neoconservative agenda is dangerous. "You do have a small group of people in Washington who would like to bring the whole Middle East crashing down, but I think they're totally irresponsible. There would be no better lesson in the law of unintended consequences. If Saudi Arabia goes down, it would take the rest of the Gulf with it. I have personal experience with the five [Mideast] families that control 60 percent of the world's oil. They're demented. They would not be able to hold on to power. As much as I despise the Saudi royal family for being arrogant, I still don't want to see them go down. It would mean tribal war, and a catastrophe of global proportions."

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