The Saudi Connection
How billions in oil money spawned a global terror network
"Chatter." Although they called themselves private foundations, these were not charities in the sense that Americans understand the term. The Muslim World League and the IIRO, for example, are overseen by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom's highest religious authority. They receive substantial funds from the government and members of the royal family and make use of the Islamic affairs offices of Saudi embassies abroad. The Muslim World League's current secretary general, Abdullah Al-Turki, served as the kingdom's minister of Islamic affairs for six years. "The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government-funded organization," the IIRO's Canadian head testified in a 1999 court case. "In other words, I work for the government of Saudi Arabia."
The year of the CIA report, 1996, was also when Osama bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan, after a four-year sojourn in Sudan. Protected by the Taliban, and with money pouring in, bin Laden, finally, went operational. He opened new training camps, and sent cash to established terrorist groups and seed money to start-ups. Then he began plotting strikes against the United States, even issuing a long fatwa, or religious edict, summoning devout Muslims to wage jihad on America. The fatwa received little publicity, but bin Laden now had alarm bells ringing at the CIA. "He seemed to turn up under every terrorist rock," remembers a senior counterterrorism official. At CIA headquarters, the agency set up a "virtual station" on bin Laden, pooling resources to track his operations.
U.S. intelligence agencies, meanwhile, were picking up disturbing "chatter" out of Saudi Arabia. Electronic intercepts of conversations implicated members of the royal family in backing not only al Qaeda but also other terrorist groups, several intelligence sources confirmed to U.S. News. None were senior officials--the royal family has some 7,000 members. But several intercepts implicated some of the country's wealthiest businessmen. "It was not definitive but still very disturbing," says a senior U.S. official. "That was the year we had to admit the Saudis were a problem."
Despite the mounting evidence, the issue of Saudi complicity with terrorists was effectively swept under the diplomatic rug. Counterterrorism experts offer several reasons. For one, this was five years before the 9/11 attacks, and terrorism simply wasn't seen as the strategic threat it is today. Only a dozen or so Americans were killed each year in terrorist attacks. Moreover, in many of the jihad struggles, Washington was neutral, as in Kashmir, or even supportive, as in Bosnia. When Saudi money began financing jihadists headed to Chechnya, Washington responded with "a wink and a nod," as one analyst put it. The level and impact of all the Saudi funding were also difficult to discern. "We knew the outlines," explains Judith Yaphe, a senior Middle East analyst at the CIA until 1995. "But before 9/11, much of it had to be intuited. It was like the blind man examining the elephant."
There were other reasons. In much of official Washington, a growing movement of Third World religious zealots was just not taken seriously. For years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those running U.S. intelligence were "Soviet people" still fighting the Cold War, says Pat Lang, who served as chief Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency during the 1990s. "The jihadists were like men from Mars to them." Peter Probst, then a senior counterterrorism official at the Pentagon, agrees. "Any time you would raise these threats, people would laugh," he recalls. "They would say I was being totally paranoid."
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