Saudi-terror complicity

Editor's note: This column is adapted from a report in the most recent edition of Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium online intelligence newsletter published by WorldNetDaily.

When U.S. forces captured al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaydah 17 months ago, they knew they caught a big fish.

But they didn't realize just how big – or where that fish would lead them.

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Zubaydah was, without doubt, a leading member of Osama bin Laden's brain trust. He was thought to have been in operational control of the terror network's millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the USS Cole. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he continued to devise terrorist plans.

When he was caught in Pakistan, according to Gerald Posner, author of a new book, "Why America Slept," he made some startling revelations about secret connections between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden.

The story begins March 28, 2002, when U.S. surveillance pinpoint Zubaydah in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos attacked 62 terrorists, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee. The injured man was Zubaydah.

According to Posner's account, based on two unnamed government sources, U.S. interrogators used drugs to try to get Zubaydah to talk. When that effort broke down, U.S. captors flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex disguised to look like a Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi interrogators, used more drugs and threats to scare him into talking.

U.S. forces assumed Zubaydah would be fearful of the Saudis – knowing he might face execution or torture.

Instead, when Zubaydah was confronted by the fake Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." He gave them telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family, Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do."

King Fahd's nephew was better known as a racehorse owner. His "War Emblem" won the Kentucky Derby last year. To the amazement of the U.S., 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 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-Qaida 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, to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaida. 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 that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden's extradition, so long as al-Qaida 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.

Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another, according to Posner's account. 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.

Is Posner right? My sources cannot confirm the story. But not one of them is shocked by it either. That Saudi Arabia remained joined at the hip in a relationship with al-Qaida long after Sept. 11 surprises no Middle East intelligence experts.

Now it's time to cut our own apron strings with the Saudis.

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