94 “I went back”:
95 should be made public: Prince Bandar, then ambassador to Washington, said in 2003 that there was nothing to hide, and Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said it was an “outrage to any sense of fairness that 28 blank pages are now considered substantial evidence to proclaim the guilt of a country.” The Saudis, it was suggested, saw publication of the classified material as “a chance to clear their Kingdom’s name.” Senator Graham did not buy it. “It seemed to me,” he has written, “that George W. Bush and Prince Bandar were performing a sort of good cop–bad cop routine, in which Prince Bandar got to claim innocence of behalf of Saudi Arabia, while George W. Bush protected him by being the bad cop who wouldn’t release troubling information” (Bandar: “Saudi Ambassador Responds to Reports of Saudi Involvement in 9/11,” 7/24/03, www.saudiembassy.net; “outrage”: AP, 7/29/03; “a chance”: AP, 7/30/03; “It seemed”: Graham with Nussbaum, 228–).
96 “I can’t tell you”: int. Eleanor Hill;
97 leaks/?details/?“central figure”/“very direct”/“cannot be”/?Graham/?“apparent”:
98 Zubaydah waterboarded June/July: int. of CIA OIG John Helgerson,
99 Kiriakou/Zubaydah: As reported, what Kuriakou learned about Zubaydah’s references to the princes came to him not firsthand but from those reading the cable traffic. For that reason and because of the passage of time, he told the authors, he is today unsure whether the Zubaydah/princes element first surfaced during interrogation or because he was questioned about something found in the journal Zubaydah had kept.
Refuting suggestions that Zubaydah may not have given good information, or that he may even have been mentally unstable, Kiriakou said he thought the contrary was true, that he did give reliable information and was “not crazy” but “bright, well-read, a good conversationalist.”
The Kiriakou interview for this book is first corroboration of the core elements of an account written by author Gerald Posner in 2003, with different detail and citing only anonymous sources. The Posner account, according to Kiriakou, got important detail and chronology skewed. The relevant interrogation of Zubaydah that produced the lead about the Saudi prince did not occur—as Posner wrote—within days of his capture but only months later, after he had been waterboarded. (This would fit with the account of FBI investigator Ali Soufan, who took part in interrogations of Zubaydah until June. During that early period, the link to the Saudi princes did not come up.)
As reported by Posner, Zubaydah was tricked into believing that he had been moved from U.S. to Saudi custody—in hopes that fear of the truly gruesome torture practiced in Saudi Arabia would lead him to start talking. Instead, by the Posner account, he seemed relieved and promptly urged his “Saudi” interrogators to telephone Prince Ahmed bin Salman—even providing the prince’s phone numbers from memory. Prince Ahmed, he said, “will tell you what to do.” Later, according to Posner’s account, he added the names and numbers of the two other princes. Bin Laden, Zubaydah reportedly said, had made a point of letting the Saudi royals know in advance, without sharing details, that there was going to be an attack on the United States on September 11.
Again according to Posner, the CIA decided to share what Zubaydah had said with Saudi intelligence, with a request that it probe further.
journalist and author James Risen added a new detail in 2006. When Zubaydah was captured, sources told Risen, he had on his person two bank cards, one from a Saudi bank and another from an institution in Kuwait. American investigators worked through a Muslim financier to check on the accounts, only to be frustrated. There no longer was a way to trace the money that had gone into the accounts, the financier reported, because “Saudi intelligence officials had seized all the records relating to the card from the Saudi financial institution in question; the records then disappeared.”
Not only Posner and Risen but also a third writer, Tom Joscelyn, have probed the Zubaydah story. Joscelyn told the authors that one of his interviewees said he had seen the Zubaydah interrogation logs and that they corroborate the Zubaydah/princes scenario. Kiriakou’s interview with the authors now becomes the first on-the- record corroboration from a former CIA officer.
Absent the logs, proof positive that Zubaydah did make the claims attributed to him is unobtainable—for the worst of reasons. Though the 2002 interrogations of Zubaydah were videotaped, the Agency has admitted that it has since destroyed the tapes. While the destruction was deplorable, it may have been done to obscure evidence of brutal interrogation rather than of what Zubaydah said. The waterboarding of the prisoner occurred weeks before the CIA received formal authority to use that violent measure (Kiriakou:
int. John Kiriakou; Soufan: Testimony of Ali Soufan, 5/13/09, http://judiciary.senate.gov, corr. Daniel Freedman, the Soufan Group; 2011 Posner account: Posner,
, 202–; gruesome torture: e.g., Hollingsworth & Mitchell, 11–, 21–, 56, 62; princes died: AP, 9/2/03, “Prince Ahmed Cited in New Book on Sept. 11 Attacks,” 9/4/03,
www.bloodhorse.com
; Risen: Risen, 173–, 187; Joscelyn: conv. Thomas Joscelyn; destroyed tapes:
, 12/12/07,
, 3/3/09).
100 “wrongdoing”:
101 credible: int. Bob Graham;
102 “assistance”:
103 40 clamored: CNN, 7/30/03;
104 “engaged”/“to protect”/“He has”: Graham with Nussbaum, xv, 231;
105 “being kept”/“It was”: ibid., 215–;
106 “If the 28”:
CHAPTER 34
1
Bush seeded/Cheney said:
In his address to the nation of October 7, 2002, for example, Bush said: “We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.… After September 11, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.” The President mentioned 9/11 eight times at his press conference just before the invasion of Iraq. “The White House played endless semantic games on the issue,”
’s Philip Shenon has written. “When pressed, Bush was careful not to allege that Iraq had any role in the 9/11 attacks, at least no direct role. But he insisted that if Saddam Hussein had remained in power, he … would have been tempted to hand over [weapons of mass destruction] to his supposed ally Osama bin Laden. Vice President Cheney went further … suggesting repeatedly, almost obsessively, that Iraq may in fact have been involved in the September 11 plot.” The Vice President liked to cite the Czech intelligence report suggesting that hijack leader Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. See note below—evidence was developed strongly suggesting that the report was unreliable (10/7/02 address: “Address to the Nation on Iraq,”
www.presidency.ucsb.edu
; mentioned 9/11:
, 3/14/03; “White House played”: Shenon, 126–, 381–, & see Report, “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Offcials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, 110th Cong., http://intelligence.senate.gov).
2
polls:
The references are to a Pew Research poll of February 2003, a Knight-Ridder poll in January that year, and a
