Did Saudi Arabia play a role in the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks of 2001? That question was raised immediately after the attack, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were revealed to be Saudi citizens, and it has only grown louder in the 25 years since as more evidence emerged of the attackers’ connections to Saudi figures inside the United States.
We speak with ProPublica journalist Tim Golden, who reports that the FBI failed to fully investigate Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset who helped two of the hijackers as they arrived in California in early 2000. Key evidence, including a handwritten note by al-Bayoumi calculating an airplane’s trajectory to a point on the horizon, was not fully disclosed to investigators.
“Al-Bayoumi was incredibly important, but this evidence … sort of went missing for more than 20 years,” says Golden. “If the Saudi government is indirectly responsible, or even if this was some rogue cell of Saudis within the religious bureaucracy, we would hope that that should come out.”
