Bob Graham, 9/11, the FBI and me

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org

I didn’t get to know Bob Graham until he was late in life. I’d met him briefly a couple of times in the mid-1980s when he was in his second term as Florida’s governor and I was a cityside reporter for The Miami News, but you can’t really know someone under such circumstances.

My real introduction to Bob Graham came in early September 2011 during a two-hour meeting at Miami International Airport. By then, his two terms as Florida’s governor were well behind him. He’d completed another 18 years of service in the U.S. Senate, made a brief unsuccessful run for president, and had been out of politics for six years.

Note I didn’t use the word retired. Graham was among that exceptional breed of public servants who embrace public service. In the first years after his January 2005 departure from the Senate, Graham spent time as chairman of Congress’s Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. In 2009, President Obama appointed him to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. A year later, he was similarly named to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. He also served on the CIA’s External Advisory Board, a natural follow-up after his 10 years on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, including as chairman.

Until recently, he also worked at the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Florida.

His wife, Adele, told me jokingly once that her husband, who died April 16 at age 87, “failed at retirement.”

A MEETING AT MIA

The 10^th anniversary of the heinous terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was fast approaching when Irish author Anthony Summers and I arranged to meet with Graham at Miami International Airport to inform him of significant new information about an unknown Florida connection to the 9/11 attacks. Graham had co-chaired Congress’s Joint Inquiry into the attacks – a forerunner to the 9/11 Commission.

What Summers and I had to say was twofold. First, a Saudi Arabian family with ties to both the kingdom’s royal family and several 9/11 hijackers had hurriedly moved out of their upscale Sarasota-area home and returned to Saudi Arabia two weeks before the attacks – leaving behind clothes, cars, a refrigerator full of food and an open safe in the bedroom. Second, the FBI’s Tampa field office had conducted a quiet investigation of those Saudis that was never disclosed to Congress or to the 9/11 Commission.

Graham listened in silence. He was not happy. He told us how FBI officials had assured him at the outset of Congress’s probe that the committee would be told everything the FBI knew. And how his experiences during the inquiry had shown otherwise. And how, as Florida’s senator and former governor, he’d made it clear that his desire to know went double for information involving his home state.

Graham long had believed the U.S. covered up information about possible Saudi involvement in 9/11 to protect America’s relationship with the oil-rich kingdom. He accused the FBI of hindering Congress’s inquiry into 9/11 by not just withholding information but lying – including about what happened in Sarasota.

“The FBI has gone beyond just covering up by simply withholding information into what I call aggressive deception,” Graham told me a decade ago. He wanted us to write a book about 9/11 with that title, but too much remained unknown then.

‘IT’S TOTAL B.S.’

Florida Bulldog’s first story about the Sarasota Saudis, published jointly with The Miami Herald, appeared on Sept. 8, 2011 – a few days before the 10^th anniversary of the attacks. In the weeks that followed, the FBI sought repeatedly to downplay, deny and contend that Congress was informed of its Sarasota investigation.

“It’s total B.S. It’s the same thing we’ve been getting from the FBI for the past 10 years,” Graham told Florida Bulldog.

Graham pursued his own campaign to unlock answers. He prodded President Obama to release records about 9/11. He asked the FBI to show him the records from its Sarasota investigation. In October 2011 he traveled to Washington to meet with a variety of officials in search of answers. That included a visit to the FBI records custodian, who let him see several classified reports. Graham couldn’t disclose it then, but one of those reports said the Sarasota Saudis had “many connections” to 9/11 hijackers and urged further inquiry. The agent who wrote the report was Gregory Sheffield. Graham tried to contact Sheffield.

One month later, around Thanksgiving 2011, Bob and Adele Graham flew to Dulles International Airport to visit one of their four daughters. They were met at the plane by FBI agents who took them to an airport office. While Adele cooled her heels, Graham met then-Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce.

Joyce told Graham that the Sarasota affair had been fully investigated and that the Sarasota Saudis had no contact with the hijackers. He told Graham to drop it.

“You need to get a life,” Joyce told him.

When Graham protested that he’d read Sheffield’s “many connections” report, Joyce badmouthed Sheffield and indicated there was other information available that put the report in a better context. Graham asked to see it and Joyce told an agent to arrange a meeting.

GRAHAM ON ’60 MINUTES’

But the meeting never happened. When Graham arrived, Joyce told him it was canceled. Joyce also told him not to try and contact Sheffield again.

“I’ve told him not to talk to you,” Graham recalled Joyce saying.

Later, in a sworn statement Graham made in support of a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by Florida Bulldog’s parent, Broward Bulldog Inc., seeking FBI records of its Sarasota probe, Graham said, “I am troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the Sept. 11 attacks.” The suit resulted in the release of hundreds of pages of records, including agent Sheffield’s “many connections” memo in 2013.

Graham kept up his efforts to get at the truth about what was behind 9/11. In April 2016 he went on 60 Minutes to discuss the significance of the censored “28 pages” of the Joint Inquiry’s final report. They were declassified by President Obama in July 2016 and featured news that former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who met with President George W. Bush at the White House two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, had connections to a major al-Qaeda figure and other Saudis suspected of helping two of the suicide hijackers while they were in the United States.

Graham also appeared at public discussions about 9/11 sponsored by Florida Bulldog in 2012 and by Florida Bulldog and Nova Southeastern University in 2016.

AN ESSENTIAL QUESTION

Again and again, he asked an essential question: Is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia our ally or our “perfidious ally?” The answer, which as information continues to emerge appears to be the latter, has profound geopolitical implications for the United States.

But as Bob Graham always kept in mind, the answer is just as important for as many as 10,000  Americans – including the families of the nearly 3,000 dead and many others who survived that horrific day – who demand to know who else was responsible for 9/11 and to hold them to account.

That reckoning is unfolding today in federal court in New York City where dozens and dozens of lawsuits against the kingdom and others have been consolidated into one monster of a case. Its title is “In Re: Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001.” It is perhaps the last best hope to obtain the truth in our lifetime.

“There are thousands of Americans who have been attempting to get justice through litigation against Saudi Arabia for its complicity in 9/11. Thus far, they’ve been frustrated,” Graham said several years ago. “I’m hopeful that will change and we will soon get the answers we all seek.”