By Caleb O. Brown
Staff Writer
Within two days of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, chartered airplanes began traveling to various parts of the United States, picking up Saudi nationals, preparing to leave the country.
One of those planes, an elaborately decorated 727, left Lexington, Ky., on Sept. 13, and one of the passengers who boarded the jetliner was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, best known to Americans as the Saudi horseman who owned War Emblem, the winner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby.
Point Given, another property of the prince, won the Preakness and Belmont Stakes in 2001.
Craig Unger, author of the book House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties, asserts that the flights would have required the approval of the White House, since private air traffic was grounded at the time.
He further asserts there is reason to believe that bin Salman may have essentially been a “material witness” in the investigation into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Unger says he obtained the flight manifest for the 727 that took off from Lexington, as well as other flights that crossed the country, picking up as many as 142 people, mostly Saudis, before leaving the United States.
Unger served as deputy editor of The New York Observer and was the editor of Boston Magazine.
Snitch spoke with Unger on April 16, just after the commission investigating the terrorist attacks cleared those associated with allowing those flights (which included members of the extended bin Ladin family) out of the United States.
What was Prince Ahmed doing before he was picked up?
He was in Lexington for the yearling sales, and Sept. 12 he bought $1.2 million worth of horses.
What about Sept. 15th? Those flights took off with the explicit approval of the president, did they not?
Let me back up, because I’m trying to be very careful here. This was a two-week process, really, that started on Sept. 13, as far as I can determine.
The first flight that I was able to nail down left from Tampa to Lexington on the afternoon of Sept. 13.
It was one of eight airplanes over the next two weeks stopping in 12 cities taking over 140 passengers — most of whom were Saudis, but not all of them. Many of them were high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family, and about two dozen were members of the bin Ladin family.
The 9/11 Commission said that the FAA had said the air restrictions had been lifted?
I’ve got the quote here from the commission’s Statement 10, which said the Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the FBI, to ensure that people on the flights did not pose a threat to national security and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country. The commission also says no commercial planes were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until Sept. 13, 2001. The paragraph closes, “We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi nationals left the United States before the reopening of national airspace.” Does that jibe with evidence you have?
Not entirely, no. Commercial flights had slowly begun to resume that day, but at 10:57 a.m., the FAA issued a reminder that private aviation was still prohibited.
Three private planes violated the ban that day, and in each case a pair of jet fighters forced the planes down. As far as private planes were concerned, America was still grounded.
It was at this time, nevertheless, the first flight was allowed to leave. There’s no question it was discussed at the White House.
We know that for certain it was discussed at the White House and Richard Clarke told it to the 9/11 commission.
My point here is not that something illegal was done, it’s that something very, very unusual was done that required a discussion and got a decision at the White House.
Here you have a decision that really speaks to the issue of whether we’re going to do a favor to the Saudis, these wealthy Saudis, or we’re going to aggressively try to figure out on 9/11 and start an investigation in the midst of a huge, huge national security crisis. What appears to have happened was the Saudis get the nod.
When did the White House acknowledge that these flights took place?
The White House has never acknowledged to me. In fact, they denied the flights took place to me, and I had at least seven or eight conversations with the White House.
Didn’t Vice President Dick Cheney appear on “Meet the Press” where he discussed it?
(Secretary of State) Colin Powell acknowledged it on “Meet the Press” and said he believed they’d arranged something, but he didn’t know the details. Dick Cheney said he didn’t know anything about it.
The FAA denied the first flight took place and they said there were no flight logs. The FBI denied it as well.
But we have Richard Clarke, who made the approval?
He was part of that discussion. I don’t know that it’s fair to say he made the approval.
He said, “I think it’s okay if they’ve been vetted by the FBI.” And my point is, I then talked to two FBI people who were parties to it and they said, “Well, we identified them, but we really didn’t interview them.”
I talked to John L. Martin, who was a very high-ranking Justice Department official who was head of counter-terrorism investigations for 18 years.
I talked to Oliver Buck Ravell, I believe the No. 2 person at the FBI. He said one of the first things you do if you’re doing a murder investigation — one person or 3,000 people — is you interview the relatives and the business associates. That did not happen here.
Why do you think Ahmed bin Salman was potentially such a key figure in the Sept. 11 investigation?
I think the definitive account of this was written by Gerald Posner. I went over his report and talked to him. He wrote a book called Why America Slept. Very, very interesting stuff about Prince Ahmed.
In March of 2002, Abu Zubaida, a high level al Qaeda operative was captured in Pakistan. During the interrogation, he explained that there were real links between the Saudi royal family and al Qaeda. He named Prince Ahmed. He knew his phone number and his cellphone. This was considered extraordinarily startling information to the CIA.
They were agog. He was not a likely suspect.
They later took this information to Saudi intelligence and said, “What are we to make of this?”
The Saudis denied it, by the way. When Prince Ahmed returned home to Saudi Arabia, he was found dead of a heart attack at age 43.
Zubaida had named a total of three Saudis. They all — in similar positions as Prince Ahmed — they all ended up dead. What was striking to me was that Zubaida said he was the intermediary between the Saudi royal family and al Qaeda.
But here he is, Prince Ahmed, being ferried out of the country with apparent White House approval, FBI approval, two days after 9/11.
At the very least, one would think this is the place where an investigation begins.
Is this a case of, upon looking back on it, the White House, Richard Clarke and others simply made a mistake?
I’m not trying to be critical of Richard Clarke. I find it striking that President Bush did not respond to the Aug. 6 memo.
I do believe reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which terrorism should have been front and center on his agenda prior to 9/11.
After 9/11, believe me, it’s got to be the first priority.
Remember, the World Trade Center is still in flames. We think the death toll was still 10,000 at this stage. America was shocked beyond belief. Why is it that our first priority was to allow these Saudis out of the country without questioning?
Think about it. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. We know the funding for al Qaeda was Saudi. The infrastructure of al Qaeda, the Saudis play a huge role.
This is where the investigation should have begun.
