Moussaoui calls Saudi Princes patrons of Al-Qaeda

Riyadh: In the decades of 80s and ’90’s, an alliance was struck between the wealthy monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the country’s most powerful clerics, leading to the formation of a financial bloc which channelled tens of millions of dollars to aid international jihad.

Saudi Arabia’s new king and erstwhile Prine, Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was one of the biggest patrons of the project.

The Al-Qaeda, one of the biggest terrorist organisations which declared a war against the United States and mounted attacks against Saudi Arabia, was one of the earliest benefactors of the financial bloc.

Saudi Arabia became one of most valuable partners of the US to battle terrorism, battling extremists of the Islamic State and defending its boundaries against Al Qaeda.

However, Saudi Arabia is still haunted by what some suspect was a tacit alliance with Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those suspicions burst out in the open again this week with the disclosure of a prison deposition of a former Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, who claimed that more than a dozen prominent Saudi figureswere donors to the terror group and that a Saudi diplomat in Washington discussed with him a plot to shoot down Air Force One.

Saudi officials have staunchly denied those claims, noting that Mr. Moussaoui was a convicted terrorist with a history of mental troubles and little to lose by spreading lies about Saudi officials. On Wednesday, experts on the kingdom also expressed strong doubts about Mr. Moussaoui’s claims.

By 1994, when Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and banned from the kingdom, the Qaeda founder was “writing nonstop against the Saudi regime with the idea of toppling it,” said Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “That the Saudis would knowingly support a movement that sought to destroy them makes no sense to me.”

But Mr. Moussaoui’s sensational allegations have drawn attention in part because far more credible figures, including some members of the national 9/11 Commission, believe the Saudi role in the attacks has never been adequately examined. More broadly, the episode has drawn new attention to Saudi Arabia’s longtime policy of using its oil wealth to try to shape foreign battlefields, currently by backing militants in Syria and Libya, and the reactionary religious ideology that underlies its society.

Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the United States were partners in bankrolling the mujahedeen, hailed as freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who were battling the Soviet military in Afghanistan.

Some of those fighters coalesced under the leadership of Bin Laden in 1988 to form Al Qaeda, which soon put the Saudi state on its list of enemies along with the United States. While private Saudi support for Bin Laden’s organization continued to flow, experts who study the kingdom said they doubted it would have come from top officials like those named by Mr. Moussaoui, at least after 1994.

The investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, would most likely have turned up such high-level support if it existed, said F. Gregory Gause III, a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A & M University, who studies Saudi Arabia.

Among the donors Mr. Moussaoui said were in a Qaeda database that he helped create were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the head of Saudi intelligence, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Both held high positions in the very government that Al Qaeda was by the late 1990s seeking to destroy, Mr. Gause said.

Charles W. Freeman Jr., who served as United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1988 to 1992, said he had tried to warn Saudi officials of the dangers of religious extremism, at first with little success. But that changed during the ’90s, he said.

“By the time Zacarias Moussaoui claims he was listing these people as supporters, they were anything but,” Mr. Freeman said.

A third prominent name Mr. Moussaoui listed was Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a fabulously wealthy investor who whose television channels air racy music videos and who employs men and women side by side in his offices.

“I doubt he would be a natural supporter of Al Qaeda,” Mr. Gause said.

In an emailed response to questions, Prince Alwaleed’s office said that “the charges made by Mr. Moussaoui, a convicted criminal, are patently and absurdly false,” adding that “Prince Alwaleed has never hesitated to condemn Al Qaeda and its allies.”

Saudi Princes’ Deep Ties to the West

Three of the Saudi princes accused by the Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui have strong diplomatic and business ties to the United States.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan was known as “the toast of Washington” who had an “aura of charming roguishness” when he served as Saudi ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is a nephew of King Salman and King Abdullah, who died last month. Prince Bandar, 65, had been close to President George Bush and his son, President George W. Bush, and helped deliver Saudi support for America’s crucial Middle East initiatives during three wars and the fight against terrorism.

He was the head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 until last April, and had been the architect of Riyadh’s plan to remove President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and lobbied against an interim nuclear accord with Iran.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, 69, is another of the king’s nephews. He replaced Prince Bandar as the Saudi ambassador in Washington in 2005 and served in that post for two years. He was the head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until Aug. 31, 2001, and managed Riyadh’s relations with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban.

In an interview in 2005, he said the accusation contained in a lawsuit, later dismissed, that he provided support to Al Qaeda “was kind of a slap in the face.”

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, at 59 the youngest son of King Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975, is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the wealthiest member of the royal family. (The rapper Busta Rhymes namechecks Prince Alwaleed in the 2008 song “Arab Money.”) He owns Rotana, the Arab world’s largest entertainment company, and holds significant investments in Citigroup, TimeWarner, Twitter and Apple, among other companies. He had a large stake in News Corporation until Tuesday, when his company sold $188 million worth of its shares, according to Financial Times.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Prince Alwaleed offered Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani $10 million for the Twin Towers Fund, but Mr. Giuliani rejected it after the prince criticized American policy in the Middle East.

Prince Turki now heads a research institute in Riyadh and travels often to the United States, where he meets with officials. Prince Bandar was recently relieved of his post as the head of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council. Prince Turki did not respond to requests for comment, and Prince Bandar could not be reached for comment.

Saudi officials pointed to assertions of Mr. Moussaoui’s defense lawyers in 2002 that he “suffers from a psychotic mental disease” that included “grandiose delusions.” Despite those claims, however, the judge at his 2006 trial pronounced him competent and praised his intelligence before sentencing him to life in prison.

Mr. Moussaoui is a prolific writer of letters to judges, and it was his letter offering to testify in a long-running lawsuit of 9/11 survivors against Saudi Arabia that led to his deposition last October. Two weeks later, he wrote a federal judge in Oklahoma accusing Prince Turki of instructing a Saudi official to help the future 9/11 hijackers. He also claimed that Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, “gave me money” and sent a large amount of money to the Saudi hijackers.

He offered no details except to say that he had met Prince Turki in Norman, Okla., in 2001. A search of news stories from that period turned up no references to a visit by the Saudi intelligence chief to Oklahoma that year. Some specialists on Saudi Arabia noted that Mr. Moussaoui and some of the hijackers were students who could have received financial support that had nothing to do with the attack plans.

The ultimate turn in Saudi counterterrorism policy came after 2003, when Al Qaeda mounted attacks inside the kingdom. “I don’t think Saudi Arabia really grasped the domestic threat that they posed until early in this century when there were explosions and they started killing people,” Mr. Freeman said.

Since then, American officials have praised the Saudi government for cracking down on militants inside the kingdom and for acting to stop terrorist financing by Saudi citizens. But the kingdom has continued to support militant groups other than Al Qaeda and armed tribes that it sees as advancing its policies in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. And at home, the kingdom’s traditional religious establishment promotes and enforces a strict interpretation of Islam.

Saudi ways are as alien to Americans as gender equality and sexual freedom in the United States are to many Saudis. Cultural difference have long fueled suspicions on both sides, despite close economic and security ties, said Thomas W. Lippman, author of two books on the kingdom. “At the ideological level, it’s a relationship of mutual revulsion,” he said.

(With inputs from The New York Times)