Saudi prince’s cell phone linked to 9/11 hijackers

By Robbyn Swan, FloridaBulldog.org

Fifteen months before 9/11, multiple phone calls were exchanged between a Saudi prince’s cell phone and the San Diego home of two al Qaeda operatives who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon, declassified FBI documents say.

The prince, Nawaf bin Saud bin Mohammed bin al Saud, had made no previous calls to the house, and would never do so again.

Within days, the hijackers, along with a friend, would drive two hours north to Los Angeles where they would reportedly meet with a Saudi consular official the FBI has called a “close contact of the 9/11 hijackers’ support network,” Fahad al Thumairy. The next day future hijacker Khalid al Mihdhar would board a flight to the Middle East.

Surveillance film from a security camera at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), unearthed years later by FBI agents reviewing the case, captured the hijackers and their friend – a Yemeni immigrant named Mohdar Abdullah – as they walked through the airport. An unidentified man, who appeared to be accompanying them, is seen surreptitiously filming airport security arrangements.

The FBI came to think the prince, or a brother who was with him in Los Angeles – Prince Meteb bin Saud bin Mohammed bin al Saud – held the key to unlock this troubling episode. And as Florida Bulldog first reported in February 2022 FBI records about Operation Encore ordered declassified by President Biden in 2021 show that starting in 2007 agents sought repeatedly to obtain then-director Robert Mueller’s approval to question the two princes who they believed might help them identify the unknown man in the LAX video.

They never received that permission. Nor has the suspicious LAX video ever been released to the public despite agents’ pleas to higher ups that it be widely shown to help identify the video’s UNSUB, FBI jargon for unknown subject.

Florida Bulldog learned Friday, however, that the LAX video was recently provided to attorneys for the 9/11 plaintiffs who are suing Saudi Arabia in federal court in New York. It remains under seal subject to an FBI protective order that continues to veil much evidence in the case, even as the plaintiffs are moving to have all evidence unsealed.

News of Prince Nawaf’s phone link to the two 9/11 hijackers comes as CBS News on Thursday broadcast segments of a 1999 video of The Capitol and nearby Washington, D.C. landmarks made by Saudi spy Omar al Bayoumi. The video was obtained two decades ago by London police who searched Bayoumi’s home. It was recently obtained by 9/11 plaintiffs. 60 Minutes will air more new 9/11 video in the fall.

Court papers say that Bayoumi, who had extensive contacts with the same two 9/11 hijackers, narrated the video for an audience he addressed as his “esteemed brothers.” He “surveys the U.S. Capitol at length” and “repeatedly orients the Capitol to other surrounding landmarks (and especially the Washington Monument, the highest landmark in Washington) and carefully films and notes the Capitol’s structural features, entrances, and security posts.” Lawyers for the Saudis contend it was simply a “tourist” video. Lawyers for the 9/11 families say Bayoumi was “casing” The Capitol as an intended target on 9/11.

While such new evidence is welcomed, it’s suppression for more than two decades is also immensely frustrating to 9/11’s victims.

“For the nearly 23 years since 9/11, the families and injured survivors have had to fight the U.S. government including the FBI, tooth and nail to come clean, declassify, unseal and produce any videos, documents, or interviews that would tell the real, unredacted story of all those behind 9/11,” said Sharon Premoli, who suffered life-changing injuries in the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York.  “It’s time for the FBI to stop playing games with evidence implicating perpetrators of mass murder.”

JAILHOUSE REPORTS ON 9/11 HIJACKERS

In June 2004, as the 9/11 Commission was wrapping up its work, staff met with Justice Department officials to discuss recent developments related to the future hijacker’s friend Abdullah, a key witness. The Commission had attempted to interview him in late 2003, but Abdullah had declined. Having pled guilty to charges of immigration fraud, he had recently been deported to Yemen.

Abdullah had come to the attention of law enforcement within days of 9/11 when his name and phone number were found in a car registered to Nawaf al Hazmi, who was aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon. When he was detained, Abdullah’s belongings were found to include a notebook with references to “planes falling from the sky, mass killings and hijacking.” Investigation would reveal that Abdullah had known Hazmi and Mihdhar from soon after their arrival in the U.S., had helped them apply for driving lessons and flying lessons.

The 9/11 Commission staff was “very concerned” by what they had learned of Abdullah’s activity. It questioned DOJ staff about a report that Abdullah, while incarcerated prior to his deportation, had bragged to two fellow inmates about helping the 9/11 hijackers. An FBI agent present assured Commission staff that such “jailhouse reports had to be viewed sceptically” and that “there was nothing new here.”

Nevertheless, the agent said, the San Diego Field Office was attempting to corroborate the inmates’ story.

From early 2004, the newly released documents make clear, San Diego agents and colleagues in Los Angeles had indeed been reviewing leads hoping to identify “individuals connected to Abdullah who may have assisted al Hazmi and al Mihdhar” while they were in California. Among other things, the agents wished to determine whether any of these unknown associates might still be a “threat to national security”.

The agents’ work would ultimately resolve a number of the questions that had lingered after official public inquiries ended. The new information included the location at which Hazmi and Mihdhar had spent their first weeks in the U.S. – information which had eluded both the earlier FBI investigation and the 9/11 Commission.

Their work targeting Abdullah would seed Operation Encore, an FBI follow-up investigation which began in 2007, lasted for almost a decade, and was first revealed by Florida Bulldog in 2016. Encore would uncover significant new information about not only Abdullah, but about the Saudi government employees, including Thumairy, who FBI records say had been “tasked” with assisting the two 9/11 hijackers.

THE LAX VIDEOS

In late July 2004, the FBI’s Los Angeles Field office acquired two videos from Los Angeles International Airport’s Police Security Unit. The videos, recorded on June 10, 2000, depicted hijackers Hazmi and Mihdar accompanied by their friend Mohdar Abdullah, who had driven the pair from their San Diego home to L.A. Mihdhar, who with Hazmi had been in the U.S. for only six months, was on his way back to Yemen to visit his wife and newborn child.

When he was first questioned by the FBI in September, 2001, Abdullah himself had told the FBI about the Los Angeles trip. The documents do not make clear why it took the Bureau so long to look for confirmatory evidence from authorities at LAX.

Now that they had them, though, the videos immediately raised alarm. For seen with Hazmi, Mihdhar and Abdullah, according to documents, were “three additional males … who may be accompanying them.” One of those unidentified males was apparently carrying a camera “held at his mid-section, and as he passes through a different magnetometer than the rest of the group, he turns 360 degrees, as if filming the entire surroundings of the hijackers.”

FBI analysis indicated the unidentified men “may have been part of a group of Yemenis who are suspected of knowing or aiding the 9/11 hijackers.” Saudi Arabia, from which 15 of the 19 hijackers originated, shares an 800-mile border with Yemen to the south.

The Bureau noted that “several major supporters of the 9/11 hijackers have been identified as having a Yemeni background.” Osama bin Laden’s own father had immigrated from Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Future hijacker Mihdhar’s wife was a Yemeni, then living in her father’s home in the nation’s capital. At the time, the father’s phone was being used as a “hub” for Al Qaeda communications. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, would later tell interrogators that 20 percent of those training in Al Qaeda’s camps were Yemeni.

THE HUNT FOR A YEMENI CELL

For most of the next three years, the FBI would search hard for the three unknown men in the LAX video. They pulled the manifest from Mihdhar’s flight and identified 23 “names of interest” whose driver’s license and passport photos they checked against the video.

They went back over past interviews with Mohdar Abdullah, and found that in 2001 he had offered the first name of a Yemeni acquaintance of the 9/11 hijackers to whom he had been introduced by Hazmi and Mihdhar in L.A. the night before Mihdhar’s flight. The Bureau worked to track down all Yemenis with the same first name who had arrived between 1998 and 2001.

By late 2005, the FBI Los Angeles Field Office reported that it had tentatively identified two of the three men, both Yemeni acquaintances of the 9/11 hijackers.. L.A. suggested the first was Ramez Noaman, the Bureau believed the second –  the one wielding the video camera –  was a man named Hani Saeed.

Neither man is further identified in the FBI records. But news stories after the terrorist attacks, reported that Noaman was a college student who rented a room in the same San Diego area home as future 9/11 hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar. Noaman was arrested by the FBI as a material witness eight days after the attacks, but was soon released. Our efforts to locate Hani Saeed were unsuccessful, and nothing more is known about him.

In a 15-page message in early December 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller, sought CIA help in questioning detainees at Guantanamo Bay – among them Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the plot’s alleged key facilitator, a Yemeni, Ramzi Binalshibh.

“In order to determine if Hazmi and Mihdhar were assisted by a Yemeni support cell in Los Angeles, we request all [Guantanamo] detainees be shown all the photographs listed below for recognition and knowledge,” the message says. The list included Noaman, Mohdar Abdullah and other Yemenis. Specific questions for each detainee were attached.

Mueller told the CIA that Noaman had been introduced to the future hijackers by Abdullah and had subsequently befriended the pair and “provided interpretation services to aid them in obtaining flying lessons.” Moreover, Noaman’s roommate, Fuad Omar Bazarah, had been “a friend and co-worker of Ramzi Binalshibh at the International Bank of Yemen.”

(Binalshibh, a Yemeni, is charged by the U.S. military commission at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp with participation in the 9/11 conspiracy. He’s been in U.S. custody since September 2002 and spent his first four years as a “disappeared” person in CIA black sites where he was tortured. Military doctors concluded in September 2023 that Binalshibh lacks the mental capacity to stand trial.)

“Noaman’s close association with Barazah, and Barazah’s close association with Binalshibh, makes Noaman’s introduction and relationship to the two hijackers while they were in California appear to more than coincidental,” Mueller’s message said. (Bazarah had been deported to Yemen in December 2004.)

Through 2006 the L.A. and San Diego field offices continued to work their “Yemeni cell” leads. They asked the FBI lab to enhance the film to determine the height of the cameraman. They kept the Director briefed. and investigated participants in Yemeni student meetings that Hazmi had attended with Noaman, Saeed, Abdullah and Anwar Aulaqi, an American-born Yemeni cleric whose contacts with the 9/11 hijackers had long been of interest. On Sept. 30, 2011, Aulaqi was killed in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.

Agents stressed they “may have been conducting reconnaissance of the security checkpoint…” and that “these individuals are most probably Al Qaeda operatives and may still be in the United States.”

Meanwhile, in September 2006, news about the Bureau’s renewed interest in Abdullah and the existence of the LAX videos broke on NBC. “Critics are certain to question whether the FBI again missed an important clue,” the NBC reporter said.

The story led Mohdar Abdullah to contact a reporter.  He referred to himself as “an innocent black sheep” and complained about his treatment by authorities. He claimed that the video simply corroborated what he had told the FBI “from the beginning” and said that “the other individual in the video was either a friend of al Hazmi or al Mihdhar” whom they “introduced to me as someone they had known” in Los Angeles. The details of the reporter’s email exchange with Abdullah were passed on to the FBI by a third party. Eventually, the Bureau would obtain a search warrant and confiscate the emails.

Then in early 2007, the investigation took a dramatic turn. Agents decided to look again at records of phone calls in and out of the hijackers’ home at the time of the Los Angeles trip.

SAUDI PRINCES, ‘CRITICAL WITNESSES

In June 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar had been living near San Diego in the home of Dr. Abdussattar Shaikh. The Indian-born Shaikh was a prominent member of the local Muslim community. He had also long been an FBI informant.

The FBI, backed up by President Bush officials, refused to allow congressional 9/11 Inquiry staff to interview Shaikh. Later, the 9/11 Commission did manage to interview him – though its record of the session identifies him only as “Dr. Xxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxx.”

According to his FBI handler, Shaikh had mentioned the 9/11 hijackers to him only by their first names, saying that they were Saudis. That rang no alarm bells, the agent said, because “Saudi Arabia was considered an ally.”

FBI interviews with Shaikh and those who knew him make it clear that he was close to the hijackers and particularly fond of Hazmi, whom he treated like “a son”. He did not charge the two young Saudis rent, even though, according to more than one source, he had financial difficulties. He was close, too, to Omar al Bayoumi, a Saudi “student” who eased the 9/11 hijackers way as they settled into life in the U.S. and who features in the video of The Capitol last week. (Bayoumi, the FBI later established. was paid by Saudi intelligence.)

Shaikh’s simultaneous relationship with both the two terrorists and the FBI had raised investigators’ eyebrows. Presumably, they would have been even more alarmed had they known that Shaikh – like Bayoumi – was also a paid informant for the Saudi government. He was being used by the Kingdom, a veteran FBI counter-intelligence agent said in 2021, to “monitor the activities of its citizens while they were abroad.”

Why had Shaikh’s phone records not been examined before? Perhaps Shaikh’s status as an FBI informant or the fact that he had assured investigators that the 9/11 hijackers had never used his phone had forestalled deeper inquiry.

The 2007 review led swiftly to two additional witnesses who provided information about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s activities that “were previously unknown.” The review also revealed information that led L.A. to send a “Priority” message to headquarters in May 2007.

9/11 HIJACKERS AND SAUDI ROYAL

Analysis showed a series of eight calls between a telephone belonging to a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Nawaf bin Saud bin Mohammed bin al Saud, and the phone at Abdussattar Shaikh’s home. The analysts noted that “there had been no previous contact between the telephones.” The calls, moreover, were “consistent with” calls made by the other newly identified witnesses – who had actually, it appears, been in touch with Hazmi and Mihdhar.

In 2000, Prince Nawaf, his brother Prince Meteb, and a small entourage had been living in Los Angeles where the Prince attended college. Nawaf was considered a “poor” prince, only 56^th in line to the throne. The calls between Prince Nawaf’s phone and the Shaikh house take place between June 4^th and June 12th – with three taking place on the 5^th. It was the very time frame in which the hijackers would travel to Los Angeles.

In their message to FBI Director Mueller, L.A. agents stressed that they did not believe that either the prince or his brother were the unidentified individuals in the LAX video. Instead, they proposed that the most likely possibility was that one of the prince’s entourage – or that of his brother – had been using his phone and was the person seen in the LAX video with the 9/11 hijackers.

L.A. very much wanted the Director to approve a request to interview the brothers who had by then returned to Saudi Arabia – the princes were “critical witnesses” on a “sensitive matter.”  Although they did not ask for the scenario to be included in its request, L.A. agents told Mueller it was possible that “Prince Nawaf was the individual who was calling the 9/11 hijackers at that time, but that his association with them was not related to the LAX video.”

There is no evidence in the files that the 2007 request ever came to fruition. Two years later, a report would note that several countries had yet to respond to requests to interview individuals “closely associated with the hijackers”. Though the document is heavily redacted, it seems that one of the countries that had failed to respond was Saudi Arabia. “Critical witnesses” Princes Nawaf and Meteb bin Saud had yet to be produced for interview by the U.S. supposed ally.

“I’m appalled that the U.S. has allowedSaudi Arabia to remain uncooperative with no consequences whatsoever, thereby placing them above U.S. citizens,” said Sharon Premoli, the 9/11 attack survivor. “U.S. foreign policy remains hostage to Saudi Arabia.” 

Though he remained in contact with the Bureau for years after 9/11, there is no record that Abdussattar Shaikh was ever questioned about the two Saudi princes or the LAX video. (A man who identified himself as Shaikh’s son, told Florida Bulldog that Shaikh recently died.)

HUNT TAKES ANOTHER TURN

At this point the record of the FBI’s investigation of the LAX video took a peculiar turn. The three-year effort to identify the three men in the surveillance video disappears – the tentative identifications of Noaman and Saeed are not seen again in the documents. It is as if the Bureau had spent three years chasing phantoms. Instead, agents begin to refer to “one additional unknown male subject who appears to be accompanying al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar through LAX security.”

To get the public’s help in identifying the unknown subject, the L.A. Field Office pushed Headquarters to orchestrate the public release of the video. To the agents involved, this was not a matter of mere historic interests, they wrote “we need to determine whether the UNSUB [unknown subject] is part of additional plots to attack U.S. interests.”

In San Diego, meanwhile, agent Dan Gonzalez was in the process of engineering an interview with the sole known witness, Mohdar Abdullah. An opportunity presented itself when Abdullah applied to emigrate from Yemen to Canada in late 2006. As previously reported by the New York Times, Gonzalez and a Canadian intelligence officer lured Abdullah to Jordan, where they spent three days winning his trust and “talking about San Diego and the hijackers”.  

The talks with Abdullah bore fruit in many ways. In particular, his memories of what he and the hijackers did and with whom they met on the June trip to L.A., swiftly led to the identification of those who had welcomed the hijackers when they first arrived in the U.S. – and from there back to a Saudi Consular official, Fayad al Thumairy, who had long been a person of interest to 9/11 investigators. But Abdullah denied being able to identify the man in the LAX video.

STYMIED

The hunt for “one additional unknown male” continued. There were meetings between agents from San Diego, L.A., New York and HQ. Improved techniques determined “with a high degree of certainty” that the man was indeed holding a videocamera, and that the man was between 5’4” and 5’7” tall.

Agents showed a still picture of “the UNSUB” to sources – they variously suggested the man looked like an Algerian, a Tunisian, a Saudi, an Egyptian. And they followed up on more than two dozen further men from Morocco, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia – one of whom was a nephew of the King.

Ken Williams, a long time FBI Counter-Terrorism agent, recalls receiving still photos captured from the LAX video. He showed the photos around his network of informants, but none identified the man. The lack of progress, Williams recalled, was a source of frustration to field agents.

Even with all this “thorough and methodical work”, the Los Angeles Field Office noted, they had still not managed to identify the cameraman. They believed they had exhausted all domestic leads. In 2008, when they requested a public release of the video, Director Mueller countered with a “to do” list instead. The video’s public release was put on hold.

In September 2009, Los Angeles wrote to push Mueller for public release of the video again. The clock was ticking, and at some point soon their ability to retrieve relevant records would be lost. They hoped, too, that the video’s release would move U.S. allies, like Saudi Arabia, to produce requested witnesses – like the two princes.

Though Los Angeles agents continued to push for the public release of the video, years passed without the go-ahead from headquarters.

In late 2013, in Sweden where he now lives, an FBI agent interviewed Mohdar Abdullah again. For the first time, Abdullah was shown the video in its entirety, instead of a set of still photos. He was “angry and upset” because “he saw what he believed to be al Mihdhar speaking to the (unknown individual) over the (individual’s) shoulder … which exacerbated Abdullah’s feelings of being used and lied to by al Mihdhar and al Hazmi. Abdullah reiterated that he did not know the UNSUB.”

Abdullah twice stressed to the agent that if the video were released, his face should be obscured. Stating the obvious, Abdullah said that if the man knew the hijackers or was a member of Al Qaeda “he would be a very dangerous individual who should be caught.”

Interviewed by the Bureau in 2018, Abdullah asked if the LAX cameraman had ever been identified, and said he “thought about the matter often.” In 2021, Abdullah was questioned again in Sweden – this time by lawyers for the 9/11 families in their long-running civil suit against the Kingdom. His deposition is classified, as are all other depositions in the case, but one plaintiff’s attorney said Abdullah was “an interesting witness. He had a lot to say.”

Ken Williams retired from the Bureau in 2017, and now works as a consultant to the 9/11 families’ civil case against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For the families and their legal teams, Williams told Florida Bulldog, the LAX video has so far been a frustrating dead-end.

Asked whether the Bureau had ever succeeded in interviewing the two Saudi princes and other aspects of this story, the FBI declined to comment. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to our request for comment.

As for the LAX security video, 23 years on from 9/11, the American people have yet to see it and get a look at the unknown men, or man, accompanying the hijackers. Now, though, as the propriety of making the airport video public is an issue before a New York judge, that day may soon be approaching,