T3 B22 Saudi Fdr- 3 Media Reports- 1st Pgs For Reference 092

THE WAR AT H O M E

FAMILY FRIENDS President Bush and Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, August 27, 2002. Inset, the burning towers on 9/11.

SAVING THE SAUDIS Just days after 9/11, wealthy Saudi Arabians, including members of the bin Laden family, were whisked out of the U.S. on private jets. No one will admit to clearing the flights, and the passengers weren't questioned. Did the Bush family's long relationship with the Saudis help make it happen?

BY CRAIG UNGER n the morning of Septemher 13, 2001, a 49-year-old private eye named Dan Grossi got an unexpected 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. Two days earlier, terrorists had hijacked four airliners and carried out the worst atrocity in American history. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia. "The police had been giving Saudi students 162

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protection since September 11," Grossi recalls. "They asked if I was interested in escorting these students from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky." 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 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 F.B.I, 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 attacks on 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration had sent out a special notification called a NOTAM—a notice to airmen— 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. For the next two days, commercial and private aviation throughout the entire United States ceased. Former vice president Al Gore was stranded in Austria when his flight to the U.S. was canceled. Bill Clinton postponed travel as well. Majorleague baseball games were called off. For the first time in a century, American skies were nearly as empty as they had been when OCTOBER

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1 of 4 DOCUMENTS Copyright 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. The New Yorker March 24, 2003

SECTION: FACT; Content; Pg. 48 LENGTH: 12287 words HEADLINE: THE PRINCE; How the Saudi Ambassador became Washington's indispensable_operator.

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BYLINE: ELSA WALSH BODY: During the first weeks of the second Bush Administration, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, met with the new President. Bandar, who is fifty-three and has been the Saudi Ambassador for twenty years, was accustomed to an unusually personal relationship with the White House; he was so close to the President's father, George H. W. Bush, that he was considered almost a member of the family. The Saudi Ambassador had been happy about the younger Bush's victory, but he was worn out by the unpublicized role he had played in the failed negotiations to resolve the Middle East crisis during the last weeks of the Clinton Presidency. President Clinton had been working on a compromise for years; after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he had called this effort part of his "personal journey of atonement." Bush had been briefed on the collapse of the talks and was baffled by Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. "Explain one thing to me," he said to Bandar. "I cannot believe somebody will not strike a deal with two desperate people." When Bandar asked what Bush meant by "desperate," Bush explained: President Clinton had been eager to leave office with a settlement in the Middle East, and Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, needed a deal to survive the next election. Bush said that he didn't think Arafat really wanted to solve the problem. Bandar believed that Arafat's failure to accept the deal in January of 2001 was a tragic mistake-a crime, really. Yet to say so publicly would damage the Palestinian cause, which had been championed by the Saudis, who would then lose any leverage they still had. Bush told Bandar that, unlike Clinton, he did not intend to intervene aggressively. Bandar left the meeting even more distressed. At the end of the Clinton Presidency, Bandar had received confidential assurances from Colin Powell, the Secretary of State-designate, that he was to relay to Arafat: the Middle East deal made by Clinton that the new Administration endorsed would be enforced. Powell warned that the "peace process" would be different under Bush. Bush would not spend hours on the telephone, and Camp David was not going to become a motel. The message was clear, and until the end Bandar had continued to hope: it appeared that Arafat would get almost everything he wanted, and that Bush's Administration, which Bandar saw as more tough-minded than Clinton's, would stand behind the agreement. "I still have not recovered, to be honest with you, inside, from the magnitude of the missed opportunity that January," Bandar told me at his home in McLean, Virginia. "Sixteen hundred Palestinians dead so far. And seven hundred Israelis dead. In my judgment, not one life of those Israelis and Palestinians dead is justified." We met in late November, during Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and Bandar had invited me to break the day's fast with him. Steel barriers block the way to the house, which overlooks the Potomac River, and I had passed through a security checkpoint, where commandos in khaki pants and vests inspected my car for explosives.

3 of 4 DOCUMENTS Copyright 2001 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. The New Yorker November 12, 2001

SECTION: THE POLITICAL SCENE; Pg. 54 LENGTH: 4794 words HEADLINE: THE HOUSE OF BIN LADEN; A family's, and a nation's, divided loyalties. BYLINE: JANE MAYER BODY: On September 11th, Wafah Binladin, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, was finishing the summer holidays with her family in Geneva. Wafah's father, Yeslam, is the Geneva-based head of the Binladin family's European holding company, the Saudi Investment Company. When she learned of the terror attacks on America, Wafah, who lived in a rented loft in SoHo, became frantic. She knew several people who lived and worked in the area of the World Trade Center, and she repeatedly tried to reach friends in New York. "I was in shock," she recalled, when I reached her in Switzerland recently. "All I thought about was the people in those buildings. I couldn't get hold of my friends.... I live only ten blocks away. Every night, I'd walk home, down West Broadway, looking up at the Twin Towers. I have pictures of myself there with my friends. We went to Windows on the World. I kept thinking, How can anyone do such a thing?" Later, she says, she heard the news that the prime suspect was her uncle Osama bin Laden. (Some members of the family prefer "Binladin.") "I thought then, Oh, no! Ill never be able to go back to the States again." In Cambridge, Massachusetts, meanwhile, another uncle, Abdullah bin Laden, a handsome, slightly built graduate of Harvard Law School, learned about the attack while ordering coffee at Starbucks. Abdullah, who is thirty-five and a half brother of Osama bin Laden, rushed back to his apartment to watch the news, arriving just in time to see the second plane crash, into the south tower of the World Trade Center. By mid-October, Abdullah, who was ordinarily clean-shaven, started to let his beard grow. People who knew him well realized that he was preparing to shed his Western ways. (He lived in an apartment overlooking the Charles River, spent leisure time piloting private planes at nearby Hanscom Airfield, and dreamed of working at a Manhattan law firm.) Instead, he said not long ago, over lunch at an Afghani restaurant in Boston, he was returning home to Saudi Arabia. His mission was to persuade other members of his family-fifty siblings among them-that they had to publicly put more distance between themselves and Osama or risk losing their reputation as honorable businessmen. The bin Laden family owns and runs a five-billion-dollar-a-year global corporation that includes the largest construction firm in the Islamic world, with offices in London and Geneva. Abdullah is still conferring with many of his siblings at family compounds in Riyadh and Jidda. He has yet to get the family to agree upon a joint public statement. The reason, according to some people who have been in touch with the bin Ladens, is that the family, despite its pro-American reputation, holds loyalties that are more complicated than either Abdullah or the family's many influential American friends, defenders, and business partners might have known. (The family keeps tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars invested in American companies and financial institutions.) "There's obviously a lot of spin by the Saudi Binladin Group"-the family's corporate name-"to distinguish itself from Osama," Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism chief, told me. "I've been following the bin Ladens for years, and it's easy to say, We disown him.' Many in the family have. But blood is usually thicker than water."