From 9/11 to Khashoggi: The Saudi Islamist State Within a State (Part I of III)

by Irina Tsukerman

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,766, October 1, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: After 19 years, the US and the international community still have not fully come to terms with the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on US soil and the role of state actors in backing the attacks. Discussion over the alleged role of Saudi officials has been mired in controversy; the role of Iran has been mildly hinted at; and Doha's hand in the matter has evaded analysis. Recent information from a Saudi investigative journalist and a former Saudi intelligence officer challenges the received wisdom. A high-level mole in US law enforcement may have not only covered up but might have facilitated the activities of lesser known actors.

The role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and specifically its counterterrorism officials, in perpetrating al-Qaeda’s atrocity against the US on September 11, 2001 remains confusing and contradictory to this day. This is not helped by the popular press, for whom the discussion of culpability begins and ends with the Saudi nationality of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 al-Qaeda operatives who were involved.

In the wake of Qassem Soleimani’s killing by the US, Iran’s significant role in 9/11 briefly gained currency. What remains completely obscured, however, are the Saudi Islamists hiding in plain sight, who are trading on their past associations with Western intelligence to pursue the same agenda they had pre-9/11. Saudi Islamists have both an ideological and a financial interest in seeing the kingdom’s modernizing Vision2030 fail.

Much of what everyone thinks they know about the reform efforts of King Salman and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) is actually disinformation produced by these “dissidents.” They include former Saudi intel and Muslim Brotherhood members like Jamal Khashoggi, who wanted Saudi Arabia to become more, not less, like the Islamic state envisioned by Khashoggi’s friend Osama bin Laden.

Yet Khashoggi has become, in the popular Western imagination, a journalistic martyr to the very freedoms he exploited and despised. Saad Jabri, a Saudi former intelligence chief, has been even more successful, absconding with billions in government funds and launching a lawsuit that has already accomplished its mission as a vehicle through which to deliver disinformation and generate a constant stream of bad press.

Are 9/11 Islamist Saudi officials heroes or villains?

Jabri worked for former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Naif, who is praised by Western intelligence agencies for his supposedly essential counterterrorism role and who is said to have survived targeting by al-Qaeda. Naif was replaced and subsequently arrested, along with other senior former officials, during various corruption probes.

In reality, Jabri, Naif, and most of their colleagues currently facing corruption and/or conspiracy charges are Islamists. Their counterterrorism bona fides were cover for their true agenda of advancing al-Qaeda’s ends, even if that meant occasionally undermining its means.

And it still works. The Islamists who made 9/11 possible are out of power thanks to MBS, but they are still up to their old tricks. They are trying to blame the Crown Prince for their own dirty work, even though he was a high school student at the time of the attacks.

Is Ali Soufan Qatar's security mouthpiece or strategy mastermind?

An important actor on the US side, former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan, recently accused Saudi journalist Hussein Ghawi of harassment and organizing threatening campaigns online. These campaigns, as alleges, preceded the demise of former Saudi intelligence officer and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Soufan, through his intelligence team, accused Ghawi of working with the Saudi government to plot his own death.

In response, Ghawi produced an investigative program. In painstaking detail, Ghawi traced Soufan's suspect connections to Qatar, as well as Qatar's unexplained links to every major intelligence failure that has marred Soufan's seemingly stellar career. Soufan's accusations against Ghawi are at best unsubstantiated and are quite likely to be outright fabrications.

Ghawi also revealed that Soufan may have been one of the masterminds of the campaign to paint the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as linked to terrorism. According to the documentary, Soufan came to the US as a translator and was eventually put on the 9/11 investigation task force. Soufan’s appearance occurred at the same time that Robert Mueller, then head of the FBI, acted against regulations to recruit foreign Arabic language translators, according to the research of investigative journalist Paul Sperry. Sperry alleges that the translators, who did not have US citizenship and were not properly vetted, were not only unqualified for sensitive work due to those deficiencies but were later linked to Islamist extremists.

Furthermore, Sperry claims that Mueller hired these translators while engaging in discriminatory hiring practices against Jewish US citizens who were fluent in Arabic. This allegation was later subject to a US government inquiry (and was confirmed to this author by a lawyer who was involved in that inquiry).

Soufan seems to have ignored, concealed, or overlooked a number of issues tying Qatar to 9/11, such as its harboring of Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, the release of a Qatari prince connected to Khaled Sheikh Muhammad and other related figures, the presence of Qatari citizens who had been scoping out the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty prior to the attacks and were scheduled to be on a plane that would target the Pentagon before changing their flights, and the operational use of a phone tracked to Saad Faqih, a Qatar-backed Saudi opposition member accused of being blacklisted for terrorist links by the UN and the US. Osama bin Laden himself appears to have had ties to Doha that have never received much attention until now.

In a similarly strange turn of events, the investigation of the role of Qataris in connection to the USS Cole bombing tasked to Soufan was thwarted by the then-US ambassador to Yemen, who later worked in Qatar. Also of interest is the fact that Qatar seems to have given a $35 million donation to then-Mayor of New York in what could be interpreted as a settlement for having provided refuge to Khaled Sheikh Muhammad. The official who proffered the hefty donation was the first by any foreign state figure to the US after the attacks.

Ghawi notes that following the end of Giuliani’s political career, he started a firm, Giuliani Partners, which opened an office in Doha and was soon joined by Soufan. Soufan, lauded for his exemplary counterterrorism contributions, ended up working with a number of Qatari residents known for extremist views. Those individuals included Muhammad Amari, whose organization was shut down in the US on suspicion of connections to terrorism. Soufan also worked with Azmi Bishara, whose support for extremism in Israel had gotten him in hot water, as well as others of that ilk.

Furthermore, Soufan received a residence via the head of Qatar's intelligence, who happens to be the cousin of Sheikha Mozah, the mother of Emir Tamim, and, as rumored in the region, the political powerhouse of Qatar. One of the security agencies staffed by Soufan in Qatar was filled with former US diplomats who had been previously stationed at the Embassy in Riyadh, as well as by other former FBI agents. According to Ghawi, Soufan also procured Qatari citizenship (which he had apparently tried to cover up), and had involved a US-based security consultancy he worked with during the Obama administration.

Soufan was not only a big name in the security and intelligence world, but his connections to Qatar's agenda, according to the information presented in Ghawi’s program, were both substantial and highly influential in the development of US counterterrorism and intelligence narratives. Indeed, Soufan used his stature, credentials, and authority to push the narrative that the 15 Saudi nationals’ involvement in the attacks was somehow evidence of top-level approval for terrorism. He advanced this argument in response to VP Mike Pence's comments on Twitter concerning Qassem Soleimani's and Iran's relationship to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.

These developments may indicate a long-term compromise within US intelligence. Soufan might not have been merely caught up in the operation; he might have been one of its masterminds. Whether all the files he was working on were undermined would require a careful review—but if many of those who were willing to turn a blind eye are now in senior positions at the Bureau or other agencies, none of that information can be expected to see the light of day in the near future.

Did Soufan come to the US with the intention of embedding himself as a mole? Was he recruited shortly after joining? Or was he part of an ongoing effort that goes back much farther than the events surrounding 9/11? These are all questions a discerning analyst might ask after watching the documentary and considering the inconsistencies in the narratives.

What is indisputable, however, is that whatever his past positions, public or private, Soufan’s current position is senior and significant in implementing Qatar's security agenda. With his gravitas, the shaping of the narrative about Saudi Arabia becomes more than mere repetition of familiar talking points; it becomes a matter of information warfare. Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney based in New York. She has written extensively on geopolitics and US foreign policy for a variety of American, Israeli, and other international publications.