10. "House of Bush, House of Saud
  
    The great escape
  Immediately after 9/11, dozens of Saudi royals and members of
the bin Laden family fled the U.S. in a secret airlift authorized by
the Bush White House. One passenger was an alleged al-Qaida go-
between, who may have known about the terror attacks in advance. Our
first excerpt from "House of Bush, House of Saud."

  Editor's note: President Bush is campaigning for reelection as
the Western world's leader in the war against terrorism. But the
president's family has long been closely tied -- through a complex
web of oil, money and power -- to the royal family of Saudi Arabia,
which has maintained its despotic grip on the petroleum-rich kingdom
through an alliance with the most militant strain of Islamic
fundamentalism. Journalist Craig Unger has been covering the
alliance between the Bush family and the House of Saud for years.
His reporting raises crucial questions about the consequences of
this personal, political and financial partnership for U.S. foreign
policy, democracy and the future of the world. Salon is proud to
present a series of excerpts from Unger's book "House of Bush, House
of Saud," to be published on March 16 by Scribner.

  By Craig Unger

  March 11, 2004  |  Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the
Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, had long been the
most recognizable figure from his country in America. Widely known
as the Arab Gatsby, with his trimmed goatee and tailored double-
breasted suits, the 52-year-old Bandar was the very embodiment of
the contradictions inherent in being a modern, jet-setting, Western-
leaning member of the royal House of Saud.

  Profane, flamboyant and cocksure, Bandar entertained lavishly at
his spectacular estates all over the world. Whenever he was safely
out of Saudi Arabia and beyond the reach of the puritanical form of
Islam it espoused, he puckishly flouted Islamic tenets by sipping
brandy and smoking Cohiba cigars. And when it came to embracing the
culture of the infidel West, Bandar outdid even the most ardent
admirers of Western civilization -- that was him patrolling the
sidelines of Dallas Cowboys football games with his friend Jerry
Jones, the team's owner. To militant Islamic fundamentalists who
loathed pro-West multibillionaire Saudi royals, no one fit the bill
better than Bandar.

  And yet, his guise as Playboy of the Western World
notwithstanding, deep in his bones, Prince Bandar was a key figure
in the world of Islam. His father, Defense Minister Prince Sultan,
was second in line to the Saudi crown. Bandar was the nephew of King
Fahd, the aging Saudi monarch, and the grandson of the late king
Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who initiated his
country's historic oil-for-security relationship with the United
States when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the
Suez Canal on Feb. 14, 1945. The enormous royal family in which
Bandar played such an important role oversaw two of the most sacred
places of Islamic worship, the holy mosques in Medina and Mecca.

  As a wily international diplomat, Bandar also knew full well
just how precarious his family's position was. For decades, the
House of Saud had somehow maintained control of Saudi Arabia and the
world's richest oil reserves by performing a seemingly untenable
balancing act with two parties who had vowed to destroy each other.

  On the one hand, the House of Saud was an Islamic theocracy
whose power grew out of the royal family's alliance with Wahhabi
fundamentalism, a strident and puritanical Islamic sect that
provided a fertile breeding ground for a global network of
terrorists urging a violent jihad against the United States.

  On the other hand, the House of Saud's most important ally was
the Great Satan itself, the United States. Even a cursory
examination of the relationship revealed astonishing contradictions:
America, the beacon of democracy, was to arm and protect a brutal
theocratic monarchy. The United States, sworn defender of Israel,
was also the guarantor of security to the guardians of Wahhabi
Islam, the fundamentalist religious sect that was one of Israel's
and America's mortal enemies.

  Astoundingly, this fragile relationship had not only endured but
in many ways had been spectacularly successful. In the nearly three
decades since the oil embargo of 1973, the United States had bought
hundreds of billions of dollars of oil at reasonable prices. During
that same period, the Saudis had purchased hundreds of billions of
dollars of weapons from the U.S. The Saudis had supported the U.S.
on regional security matters in Iran and Iraq and refrained from
playing an aggressive role against Israel. Members of the Saudi
royal family, including Bandar, became billionaires many times over,
in the process quietly turning into some of the most powerful
players in the American market, investing hundreds of billions of
dollars in equities in the United States. And the price of oil, the
eternal bellwether of economic, political and cultural anxiety in
America, had remained low enough that enormous gas-guzzling SUVs had
become ubiquitous on U.S. highways. During the Reagan and Clinton
eras the economy boomed.

  The relationship was a coarse weave of money, power and trust.
It had lasted because two foes, militant Islamic fundamentalists and
the United States, turned a blind eye to each other. The U.S.
military might have called the policy "Don't ask, don't tell." The
Koran had its own version: "Ask not about things which, if made
plain to you, may cause you trouble."

  But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the ugly seams of the
relationship had been laid bare. Because thousands of innocent
people had been killed and most of the killers were said to be
Saudi, it was up to Bandar, ever the master illusionist, to assure
Americans that everything was just fine between the United States
and Saudi Arabia. Bandar had always been a smooth operator, but now
he and his unflappable demeanor would be tested as never before.

  Bandar desperately hoped that early reports of the Saudi role
had been exaggerated -- after all, al-Qaida terrorist operatives
were known to use false passports. But at 10 P.M. on the evening of
Sept. 12, 2001, about 36 hours after the attack, a high-ranking CIA
official -- according to Newsweek, it was probably CIA director
George Tenet -- phoned Bandar at his home and gave him the bad news:
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Afterward, Bandar said, "I
felt as if the Twin Towers had just fallen on my head."

  Public relations had never been more crucial for the Saudis.
Bandar swiftly retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller to place
newspaper ads all over the country condemning the attacks and
dissociating Saudi Arabia from them. He went on CNN, the BBC and the
major TV networks and hammered home the same points again and again:
The alliance with the United States was still strong. Saudi Arabia
would support America in its fight against terrorism.

  Prince Bandar also protested media reports that referred to
those involved in terrorism as "Saudis." Asserting that no
terrorists could ever be described as Saudi citizens, he urged the
media and politicians to refrain from casting arbitrary accusations
against Arabs and Muslims. "We in the kingdom, the government and
the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated
with terrorism to be connected to our country," Bandar said. That
included Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the attacks, who had
even been disowned by his family. He was not really a Saudi, Bandar
asserted, for the government had taken away his passport because of
his terrorist activities.

  But Osama bin Laden was Saudi, of course, and he was not just
any Saudi. The bin Ladens were one of a handful of extremely wealthy
families that were so close to the House of Saud that they
effectively acted as extensions of the royal family. Over five
decades, they had built their multibillion-dollar construction
empire thanks to their intimate relationship with the royal family.
Bandar himself knew them well. "They're really lovely human beings,"
he told CNN. "[Osama] is the only one ... I met him only once. The
rest of them are well-educated, successful businessmen, involved in
a lot of charities. It is -- it is tragic. I feel pain for them,
because he's caused them a lot of pain."

  Like Bandar, the bin Laden family epitomized the marriage
between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction
company, the Saudi Binladin Group, banked with Citigroup and
invested with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Over time, the bin
Ladens did business with such icons of Western culture as Disney,
the Hard Rock Café, Snapple and Porsche. In the mid-1990s, they
joined various members of the House of Saud in becoming business
associates with former secretary of state James Baker and former
president George H.W. Bush by investing in the Carlyle Group, a
gigantic Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm. As Charles
Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Wall
Street Journal, "If there were ever any company closely connected to
the U.S. and its presence in Saudi Arabia, it's the Saudi Binladin
Group."

  At the time of the 9/11 attacks, members of the Saudi royal
family were scattered all over the United States. Some had gone to
Lexington, Ky., for the annual September yearling auctions. The sale
of the finest racehorses in the world had been suspended after the
terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, but resumed the very next day. Saudi
prince Ahmed bin Salman bought two horses for $1.2 million on Sept.
12.

  Shortly after the attack, one of the bin Ladens, an unnamed
brother of Osama's, frantically called the Saudi embassy in
Washington seeking protection. He was given a room at the Watergate
Hotel and told not to open the door. King Fahd, the aging and infirm
Saudi monarch, sent a message to his emissaries in Washington. "Take
measures to protect the innocents," he said.

  Meanwhile, a Saudi prince sent a directive to the Tampa Police
Department in Florida that young Saudis who were close to the royal
family and went to school in the area were in potential danger.

  Bandar went to work immediately. If any foreign official had the
clout to pull strings at the White House in the midst of a grave
national security crisis, it was he. A senior member of the
Washington diplomatic corps, Bandar had played racquetball with
Secretary of State Colin Powell in the late '70s. He had run covert
operations for the late CIA director Bill Casey that were so hush-
hush they were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was
the man who had stashed away 30 locked attaché cases that held some
of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. And for two
decades, Bandar had built an intimate personal relationship with the
Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.

  First, Bandar set up a hotline at the Saudi embassy in
Washington for all Saudi nationals in the United States. For the 48
hours after the attacks, he stayed in constant contact with
Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice.

  Before the attacks, Bandar had been invited to come to the White
House to meet with President George W. Bush on Sept. 13 to discuss
the Middle East peace process. Even though the 55-year-old president
and he were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, Bandar had not yet
developed the same rapport with the younger Bush that he'd enjoyed
for decades with his father. Bandar and the elder Bush had
participated in the shared rituals of manhood -- hunting trips,
vacations together, and the like. Bandar and the younger Bush were
well known to each other, but not nearly as close.

  On the 13th, the meeting went ahead as scheduled. But in the
wake of the attacks two days earlier, the political landscape of the
Middle East had drastically changed. A spokesman for the Saudi
embassy later said he did not know whether repatriation was a topic
of discussion.

  But the job had been started nonetheless. Earlier that same day,
a 49-year-old former policeman turned private investigator named Dan
Grossi got a call from the Tampa Police Department. Grossi had
worked with the Tampa force for 20 years before retiring, and it was
not particularly unusual for the police to recommend former officers
for special security jobs. But Grossi's new assignment was very much
out of the ordinary.

  "The police had been giving Saudi students protection since
Sept. 11," Grossi recalls. "They asked if I was interested in
escorting these students from Tampa to Lexington, Ky., because the
police department couldn't do it."

  Grossi was told to go to the airport, where a small charter jet
would be available to take him and the Saudis on their flight. He
was not given a specific time of departure, and he was dubious about
the prospects of accomplishing his task. "Quite frankly, I knew that
everything was grounded," he says. "I never thought this was going
to happen." Even so, Grossi, who'd been asked to bring a colleague,
phoned Manuel Perez, a former FBI agent, to put him on alert. Perez
was equally unconvinced. "I said, 'Forget about it,'" Perez
recalls. "Nobody is flying today."

  The two men had good reason to be skeptical. Within minutes of
the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration
had sent out a special notification called a NOTAM -- a notice to
airmen -- to airports all across the country, ordering every
airborne plane in the United States to land at the nearest airport
as soon as possible, and prohibiting planes on the ground from
taking off. Initially, there were no exceptions whatsoever. Later,
when the situation stabilized, several airports accepted flights for
emergency medical and military operations -- but those were few and
far between.

  Nevertheless, at 1:30 or 2 P.M. on Sept. 13, Dan Grossi received
his phone call. He was told the Saudis would be delivered to
Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar at Tampa International
Airport. When he arrived, Manny Perez was there to meet him.

  At the terminal a woman laughed at Grossi for even thinking he
would be flying that day. Commercial flights had slowly begun to
resume, but at 10:57 A.M., the FAA had issued another NOTAM, a
reminder that private aviation was still prohibited. Three private
planes violated the ban that day, in Maryland, West Virginia and
Texas, and in each case a pair of jet fighters quickly forced the
aircraft down. As far as private planes were concerned, America was
still grounded.

  Then one of the pilots arrived. "Here's your plane," he told
Grossi. "Whenever you're ready to go."

  What happened next was first reported by Kathy Steele, Brenna
Kelly and Elizabeth Lee Brown in the Tampa Tribune in October 2001.
Not a single other American paper seemed to think the subject was
newsworthy.

  Grossi and Perez say they waited until three young Saudi men,
all apparently in their early 20s, arrived. Then the pilot took
Grossi, Perez and the Saudis to a well-appointed 10-passenger
Learjet. They departed for Lexington at about 4:30.

  "They got the approval somewhere," said Perez. "It must have
come from the highest levels of government."

  "Flight restrictions had not been lifted yet," Grossi said. "I
was told it would take White House approval. I thought [the flight]
was not going to happen."

  Grossi said he did not get the names of the Saudi students he
was escorting. "It happened so fast," Grossi says. "I just knew they
were Saudis. They were well connected. One of them told me his
father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush senior."

  How did the Saudis go about getting approval? According to the
Federal Aviation Administration, they didn't and the Tampa flight
never took place. "It's not in our logs," Chris White, a spokesman
for the FAA, told the Tampa Tribune. "It didn't occur." The White
House also said that the flights to evacuate the Saudis did not take
place.

  According to Grossi, about one hour and 45 minutes after takeoff
they landed at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, a frequent
destination for Saudi horse-racing enthusiasts such as Prince Ahmed
bin Salman. When they arrived, the Saudis were greeted by an
American who took custody of them and helped them with their
baggage. On the tarmac was a 747 with Arabic writing on the
fuselage, apparently ready to take them back to Saudi Arabia. "My
understanding is that there were other Saudis in Kentucky buying
racehorses at that time, and they were going to fly back together,"
said Grossi.

  In addition to the Tampa-Lexington flight, at least seven other
planes were made available for the operation. According to
itineraries, passenger lists and interviews with sources who had
firsthand knowledge of the flights, members of the extended bin
Laden family, the House of Saud and their associates also assembled
in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Orlando,
Washington, D.C, Boston, Newark, N.J., and New York.

  Arrangements for the flights were made with lightning speed. One
flight, a Boeing 727 that left Los Angeles late on the night of
Sept. 14 or early in the morning of Sept. 15, required FAA approval,
which came through in less than half an hour. "By bureaucratic
standards, that's a nanosecond," said a source close to the flight.

  Payments for the charter flights were made in advance through
wire transfer from the Saudi embassy. A source close to the
evacuation said such procedures were an indication that the entire
operation had high-level approval from the U.S. government. "That's
a totally traceable transaction," he said. "So I inferred that what
they were doing had U.S. government approval. Otherwise, they would
have done it in cash."

  According to the same source, a young female member of the bin
Laden family was the sole passenger on the first leg of the flight,
from Los Angeles to Orlando. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
boarding any airplane was cause for anxiety. But now that the name
Osama bin Laden had become synonymous with mass murder, boarding a
plane with his family members was another story entirely. To avoid
unnecessary dramas, the flight's operators made certain that the
cockpit crew was briefed about who the passengers were -- the bin
Ladens -- and the highly sensitive nature of their mission.

  However, they neglected to brief the flight attendants.

  On the flight from Los Angeles, the bin Laden girl began talking
to an attendant about the horrid events of 9/11. "I feel so bad
about it," she said.

  "Well, it's not your fault," replied the attendant, who had no
idea who the passenger really was.

  "Yeah," said the passenger. "But he was my brother."

  "The flight attendant just lost it," the source said.

  When the 727 landed in Orlando, Khalil Binladin, whose estate in
Winter Garden, Fla., was nearby, boarded the plane. After a delay of
several hours, it continued to Washington.

  Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the Saudis had chartered a customized
DC 8 that belonged to the president of Gabon and was equipped with
two staterooms (bedrooms) and 67 seats. According to a source who
participated in the operation, the Saudis had hoped to leave Las
Vegas on Sept. 14, but were not able to get permission for two
days. "This was a nightmare," said a source. "The manifest was
submitted the day before. It was obvious that someone in Washington
had said OK, but the FBI didn't want to say they could go, so it was
really tense. In the end, nobody was interrogated." According to the
passenger list, among the 46 passengers were several high-level
Saudi royals with diplomatic passports. On Sunday, Sept. 16, the
flight finally left for Geneva, Switzerland. The FBI did not even
get the manifest until about two hours before departure. Even if it
had wanted to interview the passengers -- and the Bureau had shown
little inclination to do so -- there would not have been enough
time.

  At the same time, an even more lavish Boeing 727 was being
readied for Prince Ahmed bin Salman and about 14 other passengers
who were assembling in Lexington. If they felt they had to leave the
country, at least it could be said that they were leaving in luxury.
The plane, which was customized to hold just 26 passengers, had a
master bedroom suite furnished with a large upholstered double bed,
a couch, night stand and credenza. Its master bathroom had a gold-
plated sink, double illuminated mirrors and a bidet. There were
brass, gold and crystal fixtures. The main lounge had a 52-inch
projection TV. The plane boasted a six-place conference room and
dining room with a mahogany table that had controls for up and down
movement. The plane left Lexington at 4 P.M. on Sunday, Sept. 16,
and stopped in Gander, Newfoundland, en route to London.

  And so they flew, one by one, mostly to Europe, where some of
the passengers later returned home to Saudi Arabia. On Sept. 17, a
flight left Dallas for Newark at 10:30 P.M. On Sept. 18 and 19, two
flights left Boston, including the 727 that had originated in Los
Angeles. According to a person with firsthand knowledge of the
flights, there is no question that they took place with the
knowledge and approval of the State Department, the FBI, the FAA and
many other government agencies. "When we left Boston every
governmental authority that could be there was there," says the
source. "There were FBI agents at every departure point. In Boston
alone, there was the FBI, the Department of Transportation, the FAA,
Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the
Massachusetts state police, the Massachusetts Port Authority and
probably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. There were
more federal law-enforcement officials than passengers by far."

  In Boston, airport authorities were horrified that they were
being told to let the bin Ladens go. On Sept. 22, a flight went from
New York to Paris, and on Sept. 24, another flight from Las Vegas to
Paris. According to passenger lists for many but not all of the
flights, the vast majority of passengers were Saudis, but there were
also passengers from Egypt, England, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon,
Morocco, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Sudan and Syria. "Not
many Saudis like to do menial work," said a source, explaining the
other nationalities.

  Passengers ranged in age from 7 years old to 62. The vast
majority were adults. There were roughly two dozen bin Ladens.

  The full ramifications of allowing all these members of the
Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family to leave the country
would only become clear several months later, when the war in
Afghanistan was in full swing. On March 28, 2002, acting on
electronic intercepts of telephone calls, heavily armed Pakistani
commando units, accompanied by American Special Forces and FBI SWAT
teams, raided a two-story house in the suburbs of Faisalabad, in
western Pakistan. They had received tips that one of the people in
the house was Abu Zubaydah, the 30-year-old chief of operations for
al-Qaida who had been head of field operations for the USS Cole
bombing and who was a close confidant of Osama bin Laden's.

  On Sunday, March 31, three days after the raid, the
interrogation of Zubaydah began. For the particulars of this episode
there is one definitive source, Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept,"
and according to it, the CIA used two rather unusual methods for the
interrogation. First, they administered thiopental sodium, better
known under its trademarked name, Sodium Pentothal, through an IV
drip, to make Zubaydah more talkative. Since the prisoner had been
shot three times during the capture, he was already hooked up to a
drip to treat his wounds and it was possible to administer the drug
without his knowledge. Second, as a variation on the good cop-bad
cop routine, the CIA used two teams of debriefers. One consisted of
undisguised Americans who were at least willing to treat Zubaydah's
injuries while they interrogated him. The other team consisted of
Arab-Americans posing as Saudi security agents, who were known for
their brutal interrogation techniques. The thinking was that
Zubaydah would be so scared of being turned over to the Saudis,
infamous for their public executions in Riyadh's Chop-Chop Square,
that he would try to win over the American interrogators by talking
to them.

  In fact, exactly the opposite happened. "When Zubaydah was
confronted with men passing themselves off as Saudi security
officers, his reaction was not fear, but instead relief," Posner
writes. "The prisoner, who had been reluctant even to confirm his
identity to his American captors, suddenly started talking
animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the
Americans would torture and then kill him. Zubaydah asked his
interrogators to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family. He
then provided a private home number and cell phone number from
memory. 'He will tell you what to do,' Zubaydah promised them."

  The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA.
It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of so many
legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the
royal family.

  Zubaydah spoke to his faux Saudi interrogators as if they, not
he, were the ones in trouble. He said that several years earlier the
royal family had made a deal with al-Qaida in which the House of
Saud would aid the Taliban so long as al-Qaida kept terrorism out of
Saudi Arabia. Zubaydah added that as part of this arrangement, he
dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other members of the House of Saud
as intermediaries, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a
nephew of King Fahd's, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir,
a 25-year-old distant relative of the king's. Again, he furnished
phone numbers from memory.

  According to Posner, the interrogators responded by telling
Zubaydah that 9/11 changed everything. The House of Saud certainly
would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubaydah
dropped his real bombshell. "Zubaydah said that 9/11 changed nothing
because Ahmed ... knew beforehand that an attack was scheduled for
American soil that day," Posner writes. "They just didn't know what
it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The
information had been passed to them, said Zubaydah, because bin
Laden knew they could not stop it without knowing the specifics, but
later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could disclose
their foreknowledge."

  Two weeks later, Zubaydah was moved to an undisclosed location.
When he figured out that the interrogators were really Americans,
not Saudis, Posner writes, he tried to strangle himself, and later
recanted his entire tale.

  As for Prince Ahmed, on July 22, 2002, he died mysteriously of a
heart attack at the age of 43, so he was never interviewed about his
connections to al-Qaida and his alleged foreknowledge of the events
of 9/11. Not that the FBI didn't have its chance at him. On Sept.
16, 2001, after the Bush administration had approved the Saudi
evacuation, Prince Ahmed had boarded that 727 in Lexington, Ky. He
had been identified by FBI officials, but not seriously
interrogated. It was an inauspicious start to the just-declared war
on terror. "What happened on Sept. 11 was a horrific crime," says
John Martin, a former official in the Criminal Division of the
Justice Department. "It was an act of war. And the answer is no,
this is not any way to go about investigating it."

  Coming Friday -- "The Number": How much money has flowed from
the House of Saud to individuals and entities closely tied to the
House of Bush? At least $1,477,100,000.

  http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/11/unger_1/print.html