During the 1980s and 1990s, the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Salman, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king.
Some of those fighters later formed al-Qaeda, which declared war on the US and later mounted major attacks inside Saudi Arabia as well.
In the past decade, according to officials of the administrations of former US president George W. Bush and US President Barack Obama, the Saudi Arabian government has become a valuable partner against terrorism, battling al-Qaeda at home and last year joining the US-led coalition against the extremists of the Islamic State group.
Yet Saudi Arabia continues to be haunted by what some suspect was a tacit alliance with al-Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those suspicions burst out in the open again this week with the disclosure of a prison deposition of a former al-Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, who claimed that more than a dozen prominent Saudi Arabian figures were donors to the terror group and that a Saudi Arabian diplomat in Washington discussed with him a plot to shoot down Air Force One.
Saudi Arabian officials have staunchly denied those claims, saying that Moussaoui is a convicted terrorist with a history of mental troubles and little to lose by spreading lies about Saudi Arabian officials.
On Wednesday, experts on the kingdom also expressed strong doubts about Moussaoui’s claims.
By 1994, when Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi Arabian citizenship and banned from the kingdom, the al-Qaeda founder was “writing nonstop against the Saudi Arabian regime with the idea of toppling it,” said Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “That the Saudis would knowingly support a movement that sought to destroy them makes no sense to me.”
However, Moussaoui’s allegations have drawn attention in part because far more credible figures, including some members of the US 9/11 Commission, believe the Saudi Arabian role in the attacks has never been adequately examined. More broadly, the episode has drawn new attention to Saudi Arabia’s longtime policy of using its oil wealth to try to shape foreign battlefields, currently by backing militants in Syria and Libya, and the reactionary religious ideology that underlies its society.
The investigation of Sept. 11, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian, would likely have turned up such high-level support if it existed, said Gregory Gause, a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, who studies Saudi Arabia.
Among the donors Moussaoui said were in an al-Qaeda database that he helped create were Prince Turki al-Faisal, the then-head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington. Both held high positions in the very government that al-Qaeda was by the late 1990s openly seeking to destroy, Gause said.
Charles Freeman, who served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1988 to 1992, said he tried to warn Saudi Arabian officials of the dangers of religious extremism, at first with little success.
However, that changed during the 1990s, he said.
“By the time Zacarias Moussaoui claims he was listing these people as supporters, they were anything but,” Freeman said.
Saudi Arabian officials pointed to assertions of Moussaoui’s defense lawyers in 2002 that he “suffers from a psychotic mental disease” that included “grandiose delusions.”
However, despite those claims, the judge at his 2006 trial pronounced him competent and praised his intelligence before sentencing him to life in prison.
Moussaoui is a prolific writer of letters to judges, and it was his letter offering to testify in a long-running lawsuit of Sept. 11 survivors against Saudi Arabia that led to his deposition in October last year. In November, two weeks after the deposition, he wrote to a federal judge in Oklahoma accusing Turki of instructing a Saudi Arabian official to help the future Sept. 11 hijackers.
He also claimed that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, “gave me money” and sent a large amount of money to the Saudi Arabian hijackers.
He offered no details except to say that he had met Turki in Norman, Oklahoma, in 2001. A search of news stories from that period turned up no references to a visit by the Saudi Arabian intelligence boss to Oklahoma that year.
Some specialists on Saudi Arabia said that Moussaoui and some of the hijackers were students who could have received financial support that had nothing to do with the attack plans.
The ultimate turn in Saudi Arabian counterterrorism policy came after 2003, when al-Qaeda mounted attacks inside the kingdom.
“I don’t think Saudi Arabia really grasped the domestic threat that they posed until early in this century when there were explosions and they started killing people,” Freeman said.
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