Why
America Slept, Authored by Gerald Posner
PAF Chief and 3 Saudi Princes
Were Murdered? By Whom?
By
Johanna McGeary
BY
MARCH 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most
wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden's brain
trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda's
millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the USS. Cole
in October 2000. After the spectacular success of the airliner
assaults on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to devise
terrorist plans.
Seventeen
months ago, the US finally grabbed Zubaydah in Pakistan and
has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. His name
has probably faded from most memories. It's about to get back
in the news. A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made
startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan and bin Laden.
Details
of that terrorism triangle form the explosive final chapter in
Posner's examination of who did what wrong before Sept. 11. Most
of his new book, Why America Slept (Random House), is
a lean, lucid retelling of how the CIA, FBI and US leaders missed
a decade's worth of clues and opportunities that if heeded, Posner
argues, might have forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote
controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K.
and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated
lawyer is adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information—most
of his sources are other books and news stories—into a pattern
made tidy and linear by hindsight. His indictment of US intelligence
and law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground, though
sometimes the might-have-beens and could-have-seens are stretched
thin.
The
stuff that is going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account—based
on Zubaydah's claims as told to Posner by "two government
sources" who are unnamed but "in a position to know"—of
what two countries allied to the US did to build up al-Qaeda and
what they knew before that September day.
Zubaydah's
capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads
like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda's
most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one
US investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11
... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his 'work' for
senior Saudi and Pakistani officials." The tale begins at
2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, when US surveillance pinpointed Zubaydah
in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos rousted out 62
suspects, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee.
A Pakistani intelligence officer and hastily made voiceprints
quickly identified the injured man as Zubaydah.
Posner
elaborates in startling detail how US interrogators used drugs—an
unnamed "quick-on, quick-off" painkiller and Sodium
Pentothal, the old movie truth serum—in a chemical version
of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning
stalled, according to Posner, CIA men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan
complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two
Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be
Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more
confessions.
Yet
when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner,
"his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy
to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member
of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what
to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin
Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd's and
a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem
won the Kentucky Derby in 2002. To the amazement of the US,
the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah
of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the
Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.
Zubaydah,
writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki
al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom's longtime intelligence
chief. Zubaydah said bin Laden "personally" told him
of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave
Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda
refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom.
The
Pakistani contact, high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir,
entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan
also attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then
in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda.
Zubaydah told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was
"blessed by the Saudis."
Zubaydah
said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki,
senior ISI agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised,
writes Posner, that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban,
and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden's extradition, so
long as al-Qaeda kept its long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism
away from the kingdom." In Posner's stark judgment, the Saudis
"effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start
of the decade." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the
Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries
he named.
The
last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development.
Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another.
On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at
age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud,
41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The
last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir,
officially "died of thirst" while traveling east of
Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf Ali
Mir, by then Pakistan's Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash
in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province,
along with his wife and closest confidants.
Without
charging any skulduggery (Posner told TIME they "may
in fact be coincidences"), the author notes that these deaths
occurred after CIA officials passed along Zubaydah's accusations
to Riyadh and Islamabad. Washington, reports Posner, was shocked
when Zubaydah claimed that "9/11 changed nothing" about
the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani
interests, "because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an
attack was scheduled for American soil on that day."
They
couldn't stop it or warn the US in advance, Zubaydah said, because
they didn't know what or where the attack would be. And they couldn't
turn on bin Laden afterward because he could expose their prior
knowledge. Both capitals swiftly assured Washington that "they
had thoroughly investigated the claims and they were false and
malicious." The Bush Administration, writes Posner, decided
that "creating an international incident and straining relations
with those regional allies when they were critical to the war
in Afghanistan and the buildup for possible war with Iraq, was
out of the question."
The
book seems certain to kick up a political and diplomatic firestorm.
The first question everyone will ask is, Is it true? And many
will wonder if these matters were addressed in the 28 pages censored
from Washington's official report on 9/11. It has long been suggested
that Saudi Arabia probably had some kind of secret arrangement
to stave off fundamentalists within the kingdom. But this appears
to be the first description of a repeated, explicit quid pro quo
between bin Laden and a Saudi official. Posner told TIME
he got the details of Zubaydah's interrogation and revelations
from a US official outside the CIA at a "very senior Executive
Branch level" whose name we would probably know if he told
it to us. He did not.
The
second source, Posner said, was from the CIA, and he gave what
Posner viewed as general confirmation of the story but did not
repeat the details. There are top Bush Administration officials
who have long taken a hostile view of Saudi behavior regarding
terrorism and might want to leak Zubaydah's claims. Prince Turki,
now Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain, did not respond to Posner's
letters and faxes.
There's
another unanswered question. If Turki and Mir were cutting deals
with bin Laden, were they acting at the behest of their governments
or on their own? Posner avoids any direct statement, but the book
implies that they were doing official, if covert, business. In
the past, Turki has admitted—to TIME in November
2001, among others—attending meetings in '96 and '98 but
insisted they were efforts to persuade Sudan and Afghanistan to
hand over bin Laden. The case against Pakistan is cloudier. It
is well known that Islamist elements in the ISI were assisting
the Taliban under the government of Nawaz Sharif. But even if
Mir dealt with bin Laden, he could have been operating outside
official channels.
Finally,
the details of Zubaydah's drug-induced confessions might bring
on charges that the US is using torture on terrorism suspects.
According to Posner, the Administration decided shortly after
9/11 to permit the use of Sodium Pentothal on prisoners. The Administration,
he writes, "privately believes that the Supreme Court has
implicitly approved using such drugs in matters where public safety
is at risk," citing a 1963 opinion.
For
those who still wonder how the attacks two years ago could have
happened, Posner's book provides a tidy set of answers. But it
opens up more troubling questions about crucial US allies that
someone will now have to address.
