Report says U.S. allies aided al-Qaida

By Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey

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The financial aid to the Taliban and other assistance by two of the most important U.S. allies in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism date at least to 1996 and appear to have helped immunize them from al-Qaida attacks within their own borders until long after the 2001 strikes, those officials said in interviews.

"That does appear to have been the arrangement," said one senior member of the commission staff involved in investigating those relationships.

Said former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., one of 10 members of the congressionally appointed commission: "There's no question the Taliban was getting money from the Saudis ... and there's no question they got much more than that from the Pakistani government. Their motive is a secondary issue for us."

Kerrey said the commission officials believe Saudi officials received assurances of safety in return for their generosity, even if there is no hard, specific evidence.

"Whether there was quid pro quo with the Saudis, we don't know. But certainly the Pakistanis believed that there was. They benefited enormously from their relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaida."

The counter-terrorism officials said that by not cracking down on bin Laden, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia significantly undermined efforts to combat terrorism worldwide, giving the Saudi exile the haven he needed to train tens of thousands of soldiers. And they have concluded that those governments' funding of his Taliban protectors enabled bin Laden to withstand international pressure and expand his operation into a global network that could carry out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Saudi Arabia provided funds and equipment to the Taliban and probably directly to bin Laden and didn't interfere with al-Qaida's efforts to raise money, recruit and train operatives and establish cells throughout the kingdom, commission and U.S. officials said. Pakistan provided even more direct assistance, its military and intelligence agencies often coordinating efforts with the Taliban and al-Qaida, they said.

Such efforts allowed al-Qaida's network of cells to burrow deeply into the social and religious fabric of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, enabling the organization to survive the U.S.-led demolition of its headquarters in Afghanistan in 2001, to regroup and to launch new waves of attacks — including the kidnapping and beheading of an American engineer in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, last week.

Only after Pakistan and Saudi Arabia launched comprehensive efforts to take out their domestic al-Qaida cells — as late as last year, in the case of Saudi Arabia — did the two nations became victims of terrorist attacks. And officials in both countries acknowledge that al-Qaida's fund-raising, recruiting and training structure is now so firmly rooted that it will be extremely difficult to eliminate.

For years, there have been unsubstantiated allegations that the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia intentionally ignored bin Laden's efforts in their countries or even cut deals with him, either out of sympathy with his efforts or to protect themselves from attack. That claim is made in a lawsuit by the families of Sept. 11 victims against Saudi Arabia.
 
Both governments have strenuously denied this, and did so again yesterday.

"President (Pervez) Musharraf has been taking serious steps against extremism from the day he took power in October of 1999," including trying to purge the government of al-Qaida sympathizers, said Talat Waseem, a spokeswoman for the Pakistan government.

"This whole notion of us buying off bin Laden is nonsense," said a senior Saudi official who declined to be identified. "It's nuts. Do you trust a thug and a murderer like bin Laden? You can't."

But commission investigators have come to believe that these allegations are credible, based on their exhaustive review of all of the classified intelligence data known to the U.S. government. The 60 or so staff members also conducted thousands of interviews in the United States and abroad and had access to the interrogations of al-Qaida's most senior operatives in U.S. custody, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Kerrey said the findings are based almost entirely on information already known to officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, most of it as early as 1997 — just months after bin Laden moved his operations from Sudan to Afghanistan.

The commission is investigating why U.S. officials didn't do more to force Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to sever their ties with bin Laden and the Taliban.

"All we're doing is looking at classified documents from our own government, not from some magical source," Kerrey said. "So we knew what was going on, but we did nothing."

Now, the bipartisan commission is wrestling with how to characterize such politically sensitive information in its report, and even whether to include it.

From 1998 through 2000, Clinton administration officials pressured Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help force the Taliban to surrender bin Laden and to crack down on the ever-growing presence of al-Qaida in the two countries. But both governments refused to sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban or help investigate al-Qaida's growing empire, officials said.

The Clinton administration also learned that Taliban efforts to extort cash from Saudi Arabia "may have paid off," a commission report states.

More recently, several commission members noted, leaders of both countries, Pakistani President Musharraf in particular, have taken steps to counter al-Qaida at great political and physical risk. Members of the Saudi royal family also have declared war on al-Qaida, although commission members noted they did so only after Saudi Arabia came under attack May 12, 2003, in a trio of suicide bombings.

But a second commission member argued that the Saudi and Pakistan governments played important roles in the growth of al-Qaida. "The origins of that are very important to us," he said.

As such, the findings could renew the debate over whether Saudi Arabia has been as close an ally of the United States as it claims, or a monarchy that for years clandestinely tried to appease both Washington and bin Laden.

And it could raise additional questions about the United States' current alliances with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the war on terrorism, particularly because many U.S. officials believe both governments have been slow to purge their ranks of pro-al-Qaida, pro-Taliban elements.

The commission staff alluded to its findings, but only briefly, in a report issued last week during a hearing on the origins of al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 plot.

That report said it had no convincing evidence the Saudi government directly supported the Sept. 11 attacks but that Riyadh had engaged in "very limited oversight" of the religious and charitable entities that have long been accused of being key financial backers of al-Qaida.

Pakistan, the report said, "significantly facilitated" the Taliban's ability to provide bin Laden a haven despite international sanctions against al-Qaida, including the freezing of its assets and prohibitions on travel.

In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, the senior commission members said their investigation has uncovered more extensive evidence than the report suggests. In the case of Saudi Arabia, commission investigators believe it made overtures to bin Laden soon after his arrival in Afghanistan in May 1996.

At the time, Saudi officials feared that bin Laden was responsible for two recent terrorist attacks in Saudi territory, including the killing of 19 U.S. servicemen at the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran.

The Saudi leaders were desperate to avoid further attacks and to silence bin Laden, a vocal critic of the monarchy since it revoked his citizenship in 1994. A formal delegation of Saudi officials met with top Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, and asked that a message be conveyed to "their guest, bin Laden."

"They said, 'Don't attack us. Make sure he's not a problem for us, and recognition will follow.' And that's just what they did," according to the senior commission staff member.

Shortly afterward, Saudi Arabia became one of only three countries to formally recognize the Taliban as the rightful government in Afghanistan. The others were Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Several more Saudi delegations followed, including one in 1998 led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the longtime intelligence minister who is now ambassador to Britain. U.S. officials wanted him to negotiate the surrender of bin Laden. But Richard Clarke, the former Bush and Clinton counter-terrorism czar, and a second senior Clinton administration official said U.S. officials suspected that Turki merely ensured that Saudi Arabia would remain out of al-Qaida's crosshairs.

Pakistanis, meanwhile, were "up to their eyeballs" with Taliban and al-Qaida, the senior official of the commission staff said.

He said bin Laden, for instance, negotiated his May 1996 move to Afghanistan with Pakistan's powerful military-intelligence leadership, which held considerable influence over the various warlords struggling for control of Afghanistan at the time.

"He wouldn't go back there without Pakistan's approval and support, and had to comply with their rules and regulations," the official said. He said Pakistan opened its airspace to bin Laden and his operatives.

Pakistani intelligence officers also brought bin Laden to meet Mullah Omar soon after his arrival in Afghanistan, and then forged an alliance with both men that helped the Taliban take over about 90 percent of Afghanistan in 1998.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, also was instrumental in helping al-Qaida set up an infrastructure in its own country and in Afghanistan, and the two outfits jointly operated training camps along the border where militants were taught guerrilla warfare, the official said.

Bin Laden himself has had personal relationships with top intelligence officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia dating back to the early 1980s, when they became involved in the successful — and largely U.S.-financed — war to expel the Soviet occupying army from Afghanistan.