CIA ‘Proxy’: Unravelling Saudi Arabia’s 9/11 Role

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In the leadup to 9/11’s silver anniversary, it was widely reported a forthcoming New York District Court civil case brought against notorious Saudi government operative Omar Bayoumi would deliver “smoking gun” proof tying Riyadh directly to the attacks. Compelling evidence Saudi Arabian intelligence not only managed several hijackers as agents, but did so as a “proxy” for the CIA, has lain unexamined in plain sight for years. Yet, the Agency’s sinister shadowplay remains eerily absent from media consideration, despite mounting recognition of Riyadh’s role.

Bayoumi has long-been accused by major news outlets and US officials of maintaining an intimate and suspicious relationship with hijackers Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, immediately upon their arrival to the US in January 2000. A subsequent FBI investigation, dubbed Operation Encore, ruled there was a “50/50 chance” Bayoumi - and the House of Saud by extension - had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. This explosive finding was not publicly divulged until March 2022.

However, the media remained steadfastly silent a year later when a bombshell filing from the Office of Military Commissions - the legal body overseeing prosecutions of 9/11 defendants - was released. The document summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews conducted with anonymous high-ranking US intelligence officials. Its contents shed unprecedented light on how the CIA recruited at least Hazmi and Mihdhar if not others who participated in the 9/11 attacks, “via a liaison relationship” with Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate.

The same document elucidates how the 9/11 Commission was deliberately sabotaged by its chief Philip Zelikow, who personally endeavoured “to blunt” inquiries “into Saudi involvement with the hijackers.” Concurrently, senior FBI officials tasked with investigating the attacks were prohibited from interviewing Saudi nationals, despite “many” leads pointing directly to Riyadh’s Washington DC embassy. No wonder - probing those connections would’ve amply revealed how the GID was acting as a “cutout” for the CIA, in all its clandestine dealings with 9/11 hijackers.

High-ranking FBI officials quoted in the filing discuss how the GID was a longstanding CIA “proxy”, exploited by the Agency whenever it was “unwise or not practical…to undertake an operation directly.” This need was particularly pronounced in the context of cloak-and-dagger CIA connivances conducted “on US soil.” After 25 years, it appears Riyadh could finally take the fall for a dastardly CIA operation that one way or another resulted in 9/11. As planned, there is little chance of the Agency landing in the dock.

‘CIA Team’

Among the court filing’s most dynamite excerpts is the insider testimony of an FBI special agent, who was posted to Alec Station - the CIA’s Al Qaeda tracking unit, ultimately responsible for recruiting Hazmi and Mihdhar as assets. When in January 2000 the special agent learned the pair - known Al Qaeda operatives under intensive CIA and NSA surveillance - had multi-entry visas to the US, they produced a report warning Bureau headquarters. Its dispatch was blocked by an unnamed CIA analyst.

The same analyst not only directed the GID to make contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar upon their arrival, but falsely claimed to subsequent US government inquiries into 9/11 they had personally informed the FBI about the pair’s presence in the US. The FBI special agent personally witnessed CIA director George Tenet and Agency operations director James Pavitt bragging about how they “conspired to obstruct the 9/11 Commission,” by concealing the analyst’s activities and identity from investigators.

In the process, an extraordinary, hitherto unreported component of Riyadh’s relationship with the hijackers remained determinedly unexplored. The FBI special agent alleged Hazmi and Mihdhar were explicitly provided US visas by the American consulate in Jeddah, “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudis’ GID and the CIA team.” This disclosure is all the more tantalising given 14 of the 19 hijackers all received their visas from the same consulate. In many cases, the paperwork shouldn’t have been granted at all.

Adding to the mystery, 12 of the 14 visas were approved by a single consular official, named Shayna Steinger. Almost immediately after being appointed to the Jeddah consulate in July 2000 with zero diplomatic background, she began rubberstamping applications of future 9/11 hijackers. At the time, the consulate’s approach to issuing visas was strict, specifically due to local “terrorism” concerns. Internal guidelines stated applicants - particularly young male Saudis - should always be interviewed in person, and have clear grounds for travel.

However, Steinger personally took it upon herself to reverse this policy. Moreover, she issued visas to future 9/11 hijackers despite their applications frequently being incomplete or error-strewn, based on forged documents, and their contents giving ample grounds for suspicion. Steinger nonetheless interviewed Hani Hanjour, who purportedly piloted Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Afterwards, she rejected his application for a three-year US visa, due to apparent doubts over his stated purposes in the country. Nonetheless, Steinger approved Hanjour’s renewed application two weeks later.

In ensuing official investigations, she offered wildly contradictory accounts of why the hijackers’ visas were granted. In Hanjour’s case, Steinger initially claimed he provided requested supporting documentation. She subsequently admitted he actually hadn’t, but Hanjour’s “middle class” background purportedly led her to conclude he was trustworthy. Thanks to the court filing, we know in reality future 9/11 hijackers were granted entry to the US so they could be recruited by the CIA upon arrival, suggesting Steinger was acting on Agency orders.

‘Local Dissidents’

Once Hazmi and Mihdhar touched down in Los Angeles in January 2000, almost immediately they crossed paths with Omar Bayoumi at an airport restaurant. FBI reports cited in the court filing indicate a witness who observed their meeting saw Bayoumi “dropping a piece of paper” near the pair’s table, “then striking up a conversation with them” in a manner that appeared “unnatural.” The witness relayed this account to the Bureau in 2002, but it was never publicised.

In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi maintained his meeting with Hazmi and Mihdhar was pure happenstance. The extraordinary assistance he gave them immediately thereafter - including finding them an apartment, cosigning their lease, setting them up bank accounts, and gifting them substantial sums towards their rent - was simply charity for fellow Muslims who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture, Bayoumi asserted. But the filing offers numerous striking insights into the dark reality of his contact with the future hijackers.

For example, it appears Bayoumi was secretly instructed to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, by extremist cleric and Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs official Fahad Thumairy. The filing cites evidence indicating Bayoumi was himself in California “to spy on local dissidents” of Saudi extraction. He was seen with the two 9/11 hijackers “on numerous occasions,” going to the extent of organising “a social gathering for the hijackers.” We can only guess who may also have been in attendance.

Another stunning exposure in the filing concerns Hazmi and Mihdhar lodging with longtime FBI informant and asset Abdussattar Shaikh from September 2000 onwards. That Shaikh failed to provide their surnames to his handler despite being asked has been known for many years. The joint congressional and senate intelligence committee probe into 9/11 ruled the pair’s stay with Shaikh was “the [US] intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” Insulating Hazmi and Midhar from Bureau scrutiny may have been his explicit objective.

The filing indicates he himself “was receiving funds” from Riyadh, while simultaneously serving as an FBI informant. “Prominent” Saudis “would stay at Shaikh’s boarding house while visiting California,” it states. His mission was “to monitor the activities of [Saudi] citizens while they were abroad.” Hani Hanjour also stayed with Shaikh alongside Hazmi, after Mihdhar returned to Saudi Arabia in late 2000. It appears at every stage Stateside, the hijackers were in intimate proximity with figures connected to Saudi intelligence.

Given the GID was acting directly on the CIA’s behalf, this contact raises the obvious prospect the Agency - via its Riyadh “proxy” - was directly monitoring the movements of Hazmi, Midhar, and Hanjour if not other Saudi-born hijackers from the moment they entered the US at the Agency’s direction, until 9/11 itself. The extent to which the CIA could’ve influenced their actions, behaviour and movements throughout is unknown, but the scope was self-evidently massive.

‘Saudi Involvement’

All along, Alec Station deliberately concealed the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar in the US from the FBI, until it was too late. The filing records how in June 2001 Station representatives showed senior Bureau officials photographs of three Al Qaeda operatives, including Hazmi and Mihdhar. However, the CIA refused to answer questions about the individuals in the photos, or provide identifying information. Had they done so, the FBI could’ve readily found Hazmi and Mihdhar’s names and addresses listed in San Diego’s local phone directory.

This was a flagrant dangle, obviously intended to gauge the Bureau’s cognisance of the identities of the individuals pictured, and their presence in the US. The filing also indicates the FBI conducted a dedicated counterintelligence investigation into Omar Bayoumi prior to 9/11, due to suspicions “he was operating as an intelligence officer.” Yet, when the Bureau contacted the CIA for information on Bayoumi, they were told the Agency “held no files” on him at all - a “falsehood”.

In reality, the CIA maintained plentiful “operational” records on Bayoumi, which were “never passed to the FBI.” Such brazen stonewalling persisted long after 9/11. Upon learning tens of thousands of dollars had been sent from Haifa bin Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador to the US Bandar bin Sultan, to Bayoumi’s wife, the Bureau attempted to subpoena their financial records from Washington DC’s Riggs Bank. Per the filing, “officials at Riggs thwarted the FBI’s efforts to obtain the records for a year.”

Riggs Bank - which counted US Presidents and CIA-installed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as clients - collapsed amid major money laundering scandals, in 2005. Post-9/11 investigations identified financial improprieties in accounts held by several wealthy Saudis - including a lack of required background checks, and consistent failure to alert regulators over large transactions violating federal banking laws. Riggs’ downfall precisely mirrors the unceremonious end of many confirmed CIA front banks past, such as Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which assisted criminal cloak-and-dagger connivances including Iran/Contra.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the filing records how “diplomatic pressure” was exerted on the FBI not to investigate Riyad’s myriad connections to 9/11. Bureau agents testifying to the joint inquiry into the attacks were moreover “instructed not to reveal the full extent of Saudi involvement with Al-Qaeda.” Senior officials at FBI headquarters knew “of both Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and…the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar,” but “suppressed investigations” into these burning matters.

The filing concludes by noting Bayoumi was subsequently arrested in Britain on immigration charges immediately after 9/11, with authorities finding “extremist literature in his apartment.” The significance of this disclosure has gone entirely unnoticed, since 2022. Only now, as a result of the New York court case, has the media acknowledged how within days of the attacks, “game-changing” evidence directly implicating Bayoumi in 9/11 was seized from his British home by counter-terror police within days, then shared with the FBI, which did nothing.

Quite unbelievably, the incriminating haul supposedly included a phonebook listing over two dozen Saudi government officials in the US and Saudi Arabia; flight simulator software; tickets and travel documents; and a notepad featuring a sketch of an aircraft. An accompanying note from a British counter-terror officer stated of the latter: “contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes.” A member of the 9/11 families’ legal team behind the court action boldly informed the BBC, “it’s the mathematical calculation of the [Pentagon] crash.”

By September 22nd 2001, this seemingly incontrovertible windfall was in the Bureau’s possession. So too highly illuminating home video tapes of Bayoumi roaming around Washington DC in 1999, highlighting security measures in place at the Capitol building, openly discussing nearby Reagan National Airport, and referencing an unspecified “plan” on camera. Other tapes feature Bayoumi in close quarters with senior Al Qaeda figures such as Anwar Awlaki, assassinated in a September 2011 US drone strike.

Newly-released video from the late 1990s depicts Omar Bayoumi paintballing with Anwar Awlaki

While British detectives apparently believed they possessed “more than sufficient evidence” to extradite Bayoumi to stand trial, Washington ordered him freed, and he returned to Saudi Arabia. US authorities’ resistance is understandable, given the overwhelming abundance of evidence pointing ineluctably to the CIA at the very least actively facilitating the 9/11 attacks, if not carrying them out, using the Saudis as scapegoats. Media determination to avoid mentioning how Bayoumi et al provably acted as “proxies” for the CIA shows the coverup continues today.