Saudi Arabia's True Role in 9/11 | Opinion

When we recently explained why improving relations with Saudi Arabia would be in America's national interest, some readers asked, "Don't you know about the Saudi's role in 9/11?" That same objection was raised again when the PGA Tour announced its intention to merge with the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour. Well, as a matter of fact we both know a good deal about al-Qaeda's role in the 9/11 attacks. Here is a summary:

Saudis never made up the majority of al-Qaeda's leadership or membership. Below Osama bin Ladin, al-Qaeda's leadership was primarily Egyptian. Al-Qaeda's foot soldiers came from across the Muslim world with North Africans, Indonesians and Pakistanis contributing far more than Saudis. Saudis were used to carry out the 9/11 attacks primarily because it was far easier for them to obtain visas to the United States than it was for their Egyptian or Pakistani colleagues.

Nor did al-Qaeda's political agenda originate in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Islam has a long tradition of puritanical intolerance which has most often been directed against the religious practices of other Muslims. Within Saudi Arabia, the religious scholars have an equally long history of condemning terrorism, especially when it involves suicide.

Al-Qaeda's principal ideologue was the Egyptian physician Ayman Zawahiri who drew his views largely from the more radical elements of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood movement. Zawahiri participated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and openly called for the overthrow of all Arab monarchies. Again, this view was at odds with the Saudi religious establishment who were then and remain today supporters of the Saudi monarchy.

Osama Bin Ladin was al-Qaeda's charismatic front man and financier. Having fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989 and soon began criticizing the government for being insufficiently Islamic. He left Saudi Arabia in 1991. Three years later, King Fahd stripped Bin Ladin of his Saudi citizenship and froze his financial assets. This very public and highly unusual step made it clear that Osama Bin Ladin was now regarded as an enemy of the Saudi state.

In 1996, Bin Ladin issued his Declaration of War Against the American Occupiers of Mecca and Medina. In it he accused the Saudi king of "issuing pagan laws" and serving as a lackey to "the Crusader-Zionist alliance."

As Bin Ladin's calls for the violent overthrow of the Saudi government intensified, the Saudi government sought unsuccessfully to extradite him first from Sudan and later from Afghanistan. As the final report of the 9/11 Commission stated, "Saudi Government officials at the highest level worked closely with top U.S. officials to solve the Bin Ladin problem diplomatically." Thus, long before 9/11, the Saudi government recognized that al-Qaeda posed a serious risk to its own security.

Their fears were well founded. In 2003, al-Qaeda began an extremely violent, three-year terrorist campaign in Saudi Arabia explicitly intended to overthrow the government. Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked housing compounds, government offices and oil facilities. They killed more than 100 Saudi police officers in a seemingly endless series of shootouts. In 2004 al-Qaeda terrorists took over the American Consulate compound in Jeddah and killed five employees. Unlike a similar event in Tehran 25 years earlier, the Saudi National Guard quickly retook the compound, killing or capturing all of the terrorists including one who tried to hide in a palm tree.

Saudi Arabia is a relatively weak nation militarily with a lot of wealth to protect. It values stability and has long opposed anything that unsettles the Middle East, including: the Soviet Union's Marxism, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab Nationalism, Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and Bin Ladin's jihad. It has also depended on security commitments made by numerous American presidents starting with Harry Truman and realized in 1990, when George H. W. Bush sent 500,000 American troops to turn back Saddam Hussein. It would make very little sense for the king of Saudi Arabia to cooperate with his sworn enemy to launch an attack on his most important strategic partner.

That is what the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report concluded in 2004 when it stated that there was no evidence linking the Saudi government or its senior officials to the 9/11 attacks.

When the 28 classified pages of the report were released in 2016, they did not alter that conclusion. Then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes made clear that "it is important to note that this section of the report does not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were subsequently investigated."

Senators Richard Bird and Dianne Feinstein, the Chairman and Ranking Minority Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, issued another statement noting that "These pages include unconfirmed allegations and raw reporting that has been subject to conspiracy theories for years." "We need to put an end to the conspiracy theories and idle speculation that do not shed light on the 9/11 attacks."

The evidence alleging Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks has been reviewed by the U.S. government more than once. The FBI released its own previously classified reports on the matter in 2021. While we remain open to new information, after 22 years of vigorous searching, the conspiracy theorists have yet to find a smoking gun.

David H. Rundell is the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads and a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.