Previously unreported interviews filed in court claim CIA is hiding information relating to a failed ‘recruitment’ effort

Seth Hettena Mar 22, 2023

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. 

The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking men with whom he struck up a conversation with were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first two future 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States. Was this meeting, as the alleged agent later claimed to investigators, mere happenstance? Or was it an intelligence operation being conducted on U.S. soil? It was an intelligence operation, according to a previously-unreported court filing SpyTalk has obtained that corroborates and expands our understanding of this extraordinary meeting, which took place just as the 9/11 plot was taking shape.

The court filing details a five-year inquiry by an investigator for the Guantanamo Military Commission into whether the meeting at the Mediterranean Gourmet restaurant was an operation that involved not only Saudi agents but CIA officers as well. 

The theory that the CIA had launched a failed effort to recruit the hijackers through the Saudis has been around for years, and was always circumstantial at best, but the document obtained by SpyTalk reveals there is more evidence to support it. One former FBI agent claimed to the investigator that the CIA possesses top secret “operational” files and a “paper trail” about the Saudi spy who met the hijackers that are still being suppressed.

A CIA spokesperson denied that the agency was hiding information. The FBI declined to comment. 

The revelations were found in a 21-page court document filed in 2021 at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba where the cases of the 9/11 defendants are being heard. The document was on the public docket, but went unreported because it was completely redacted except for an unclassified marking. Spytalk obtained an unredacted copy. 

The legal filing consists of summaries of interviews with anonymous FBI agents, 9/11 Commission staff and others who investigated the attacks on New York and Washington. It was compiled by Don Canestraro, an investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, as the court hearing the cases of the 9/11 defendants is formally known. Canestraro previously served for more than two decades as an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

Canestraro’s filing is chock-full of new details about the multiple investigations into 9/11. And it follows the release last year of declassified FBI documents that offered an unprecedented portrait of Saudi intelligence operations inside America. Read together, this new information raises issues that go to the heart of America’s fraught relationship with the oil-rich Kingdom—and the 9/11 attacks.

Four unnamed former FBI agents involved in the 9/11 investigation told Canestraro they believed the CIA was covering up an operation on U.S. soil to penetrate Al Qaeda. The most explosive allegations come from a former FBI agent who spoke to Canestraro in June 2021. The former agent, identified only as CS-23, was described as having “extensive knowledge of counter-terrorism and counterintelligence matters.” 

CS-23 pointedly described the meeting between the Saudi agent and the hijackers at the Middle Eastern Gourmet restaurant as part of “an operation directed by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and indicated that the CIA has “operational” files on Bayoumi that predated 9/11.

Before 9/11, according to CS-23, the CIA was determined to get a human source inside Osama bin Laden’s terror network, and the arrival of two members of Al Qaeda in Southern California in January 2000 offered an unprecedented opportunity. The CIA is legally barred from collecting information on U.S. citizens  “but its foreign intelligence collection mission can be conducted anywhere,” according to the agency website. 

Collaborators 

After 9/11, CS-23 told Canestraro, “FBI officials in San Diego and at FBI headquarters became aware of both Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and subsequently the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar through Bayoumi.” Senior FBI officials “suppressed investigations” into the matter, C-23 said.

CS-23’s account could not be independently verified. Canestraro said all the former CIA officers and FBI agents he spoke with were granted anonymity and Canestraro said he could not put SpyTalk in touch with CS-23 without violating attorney-client privilege.

Canestraro said his investigation would not have been possible without initial assurances of confidentiality. The FBI has tried to silence at least one former agent who spoke publicly about Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 investigation. In a 2019 letter, a copy of which was obtained by SpyTalk, the bureau reminded the agent of the duty of confidentiality that he agreed to when he joined the bureau and instructed him to clear all future disclosures with headquarters.

More @ https://www.spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fbi-agents-accuse-cia-of