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Did the Saudis Play a Role in 9/11? Here’s What We Found

Investigators continued to investigate Saudi links to 9/11 even after high-level officials discounted connections.

The Sept. 11 attacks, and U.S. visas for Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers.Credit...Photo illustration by Mark Weaver

F.B.I. agents who secretly investigated Saudi connections to the 9/11 attacks for more than a decade after high-level officials discounted government links found circumstantial evidence of such support but could not find a smoking gun, a joint investigation by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica shows.

One dogged F.B.I. agent in San Diego helped drive the investigation for years, after superiors advised the team to give up on the case. Three presidential administrations have built a wall of secrecy around information about possible Saudi government ties to the attacks.

“Given the lapse of time, I don’t know any reason why the truth should be kept from the American people,” said Richard Lambert, who led the F.B.I.’s initial 9/11 investigation in San Diego.

The full article includes new details that have never been reported before, revealing missed investigative opportunities. Read the entire article from The New York Times Magazine here.

But if you have limited time, here are the main takeaways.

An investigator found evidence that suggested Omar al-Bayoumi, a mysteriously well-connected Saudi student who knew two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, might have had prior knowledge of the plot, even though senior U.S. officials had essentially exonerated him.

In a trove of seemingly disorganized evidence taken from Bayoumi’s home in Birmingham, England, in 2001, [a] detective found a spiral notebook that contained a hand-drawn aviation diagram of a plane descending to strike a spot on the ground. An F.B.I. agent who had studied aeronautical engineering concluded that the diagram showed a formula for an aerial descent like the one performed by Flight 77, the jet that Hazmi and Mihdhar hijacked, before it struck the Pentagon. Apparently, the notebook and its contents went unnoticed after Bayoumi’s detention and hadn’t been looked at again.

A former supervisor of the investigation said he thought the finding would have been more significant if it had been discovered in the fall of 2001.

“That would have been harder evidence,” the supervisor, Joseph Foelsch, said. “If not a smoking gun, a warm gun.”

Telephone records that were reanalyzed years later revealed multiple calls among Mr. Bayoumi; Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi diplomat and imam; and Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in a drone attack in 2011.

In 2010, the F.B.I. planned to place two Saudi religious officials from the kingdom’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs under full-time surveillance. The bureau had previously found that their travel overlapped with movements by the hijackers and people believed to be supporting them, and that they had ties to suspected militants. The two men sought new visas to study English in the United States, which officials feared could be cover for something nefarious.

But, F.B.I. agents believe, the C.I.A. intervened before the surveillance could happen.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, ended abruptly. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, C.I.A. officers objected strongly to the F.B.I. plan, one former official said. “They didn’t want to give the Saudis a black eye by letting these guys walk into a trap,” the former official said. For reasons that remain unclear, the two Saudis canceled the visit at the last minute. F.B.I. officials suspected that someone in the Saudi government had been warned.

To gain the trust of a reluctant source, investigators lied and told a Yemeni man he had a previously unknown child. The investigator employed a graphics editor to fabricate an image of a 5-year-old using images of the man and his wife.

“I knew I had a kid!” the man, Mohdar Abdullah, said excitedly.

The man later provided intelligence that led investigators to two more people who knew two of the hijackers when they were in California, helping to piece together where they spent their first two weeks in the United States.

Federal prosecutors in New York issued grand jury subpoenas for two witnesses as recently as 2015, but the subpoenas were withdrawn. A senior prosecutor said there was not enough hard evidence for a successful prosecution.

In 2016, the investigative team was broken up, with the case assigned to another team. The Justice Department insists it remains open, but officials said there had been little activity since 2016.

A correction was made on 
Jan. 25, 2020

An earlier version of this article misstated the nationality of Mohdar Abdullah. He was Yemeni, not Saudi.

How we handle corrections

Daniel Victor is a Hong Kong-based reporter, covering a wide variety of stories with a focus on breaking news. He joined The Times in 2012 from ProPublica. More about Daniel Victor

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