Saudi princes and 9/11
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Saudi princes and 9/11 is John Kiriakou's account of a discovery in Abu Zubaydah's diary, seized the night of his capture. Leafing through it, Kiriakou found three cell-phone numbers belonging to three members of the Saudi royal family. Why would a man believed to be al-Qaeda's number three carry three Saudi princes' personal numbers? The CIA warned the Saudis to "take care of this or we will, and you won't like how." Soon after, Kiriakou says, one prince died on the operating table during bariatric surgery, one in a one-car accident on the Riyadh-Jeddah highway, and one "of thirst" while camping in the desert, convincing him the Saudi government was involved in 9/11, and that the Saudis wanted the princes dead before the CIA could interrogate them.

In an earlier telling, Kiriakou described the same episode with two of the princes: after the CIA approached the Saudis about the numbers in the diary, one prince went camping and died of thirst, and another was killed in a "spectacular" one-car accident in the desert.

Kiriakou frames the princes' deaths against the broader religious grievance bin Laden used to recruit against the United States: bin Laden repeatedly said that the American military presence in Saudi Arabia was "polluting the land of the two holy mosques", Mecca and Medina, and al-Qaeda spread false rumors that female U.S. soldiers were driving illegally under Saudi law and that American troops were having sex and eating pork near the Kaaba. Kiriakou says his own mainstream view of 9/11 is that Israel had advance notice of the attack and made a strategic decision not to warn Washington, calculating that the American response, which killed roughly 2 million Muslims over the following 20 years, in his estimate, would benefit Israel by leading to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Elsewhere Kiriakou has named names on the Saudi side: he says he believes the Saudis or elements of the Saudi government were deeply involved in planning and financing the 9/11 attacks, "going all the way up to" Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence. He recalls George Tenet confronting Bandar in person at CIA headquarters immediately after 9/11, telling him the CIA knew Saudi government officials and royal family members were involved and that the U.S. was "going to start killing people" regardless of surname. Kiriakou nonetheless says he does not buy a fuller "truther" theory that Bandar coordinated the attacks with Dick Cheney, calling the risk of exposure too great; he instead attributes any Saudi role to fundamentalist "true believers" inside the royal family who wanted to attack the United States on their own initiative. He identifies the prince who died in the car crash as Sultan bin Faisal, later reported to have suffered a heart attack while driving, and the one who died of thirst as Fahad bin Faisal, whose funerals were held a day apart; a CNN report he cites separately found that one of the unlisted numbers in Abu Zubaydah's book belonged to a company managing Bandar's estate in Aspen, Colorado.

Musaed al-Jarrah and Saudi financing networks

Kiriakou says a 2020 court filing accidentally left one redaction exposed, revealing for the first time the name of a Saudi diplomat, Musaed al-Jarrah, representative in Washington of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, as the middleman connecting the Saudi government to money used to house two of the 9/11 hijackers. He says al-Jarrah funneled money, possibly originating from the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, through a Los Angeles cutout who used it to procure the hijackers' apartment, and that he does not believe the leak of al-Jarrah's name was accidental, he suspects FBI staff at the working level are tired of the government covering for the Saudis. Every mention Kiriakou made of Saudi Arabia in his memoir The Reluctant Spy was redacted by the CIA's prepublication review board and does not appear in the published book. He says the same Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs office once represented by al-Jarrah finances mosques and Islamic centers across the U.S., including the King Fahd mosque in California, and is largely responsible for Islam's rapid spread across Latin America; separately, he says Saudi Arabia supplies the U.S. Bureau of Prisons with Qurans carrying fundamentalist Saudi commentary, which he believes radicalizes inmates who then gravitate toward Saudi-built mosques after release. Kiriakou's own assessment is that any Saudi cooperation with the hijackers most likely ran through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Saudi intelligence, without necessarily the direct knowledge of the kingdom's highest levels.

Kiriakou has separately described being present in Saudi Arabia for two incidents that shaped his view of the kingdom's relationship with jihadist violence. In 1995 he was there when Saudi authorities arrested a cell behind the bombing of the OPM-SANG facility in Riyadh, beat televised confessions out of them, and beheaded the group, which called itself al-Qaeda, a name that "meant nothing" to U.S. officials at the time. And on his first CIA trip abroad, sent to Saudi Arabia at 25 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a Saudi guard told him bluntly: "we are not friends, you are hired help, we paid for you to come here and to protect the oil fields."

Omar al-Bayoumi and the FBI's 2015 investigation

Kiriakou also points to the FBI's 2015 investigation, declassified in 2021, of Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi in Los Angeles, whose account of meeting two of the hijackers by chance did not hold up: witnesses instead described him standing at a window watching for the men and greeting them in Arabic before sitting down together. Kiriakou says the official Saudi embassy response to the documents was carefully worded to deny only that senior royal family members or senior officials were involved, implicitly acknowledging lower-level Saudi government involvement, and that the Muslim World League, based in Jeddah and funded solely by the Saudi government despite being presented as an NGO, funneled money to the hijackers through al-Bayoumi, which he calls official Saudi government involvement in itself. He says the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan wired $50,000 to al-Bayoumi, who then gave the money to the hijackers to cover rent, food, and possibly airline tickets, and that al-Bayoumi turned out to be a "ghost employee" of a Saudi airline company, paid without anyone seeing him work, leading Kiriakou to conclude he was a Saudi intelligence officer. He says the documents were declassified only because President Biden ordered it, reportedly under pressure from 9/11 families who barred him from the 20th-anniversary commemoration otherwise. Separately, he notes that the only flight permitted in U.S. airspace on 9/11 besides the Bin Laden family's departure was a plane sent from San Diego to Miami to deliver antivenom for a man bitten by a taipan snake.

How the numbers travelled

In a 2026 keynote Kiriakou traced the reporting chain itself, which he says was improvised and insecure. Sitting at the hospital with the diary in his hands, he telephoned Islamabad and told the analyst on the other end that he thought he was looking at the personal cell numbers of three Saudi princes. The analyst's reply was "You've got to be kidding me," and Kiriakou then read the names and the numbers out over the line, "I violated all kinds of security issues", for the analyst to cable to headquarters. The response from headquarters was a single line: "Thank you." It took another couple of months for the information to reach George Tenet.

In this telling the princes are Prince Bandar bin Sultan's cousins, and Kiriakou treats their deaths as an operational loss rather than a resolution: "Bandar didn't do us any favors by having his cousins killed. He set us back. But, that was the plan. Because those three princes would have had to answer questions as to why in the world their personal cell phone numbers were in Abu Zubaydah's diary." He gives the three deaths in the same order he always gives them, bariatric bypass surgery, a one-car accident on the Riyadh,Jeddah highway, and death of thirst on a desert camping trip he had made many times before.

The angry démarche

A compressed May 2026 retelling adds the tone of the approach to Riyadh, which Kiriakou elsewhere renders as a threat. Here the diary is seized alongside Abu Zubaydah himself, the three princes' personal cell numbers are found in it, and the CIA goes to the Saudis "very angrily" with one line: "You better do something about this."

The three deaths follow in his standard order, with one variation in the medical detail: the surgery he usually specifies as bariatric is given here simply as "stomach surgery," still fatal on the operating table. The other two are unchanged, a one-car accident on the Riyadh-to-Jeddah highway, and death of thirst on a desert camping trip.

He again treats the last of these as the one that gives the game away, and the argument is the same one he always makes from it: the man camped in the desert routinely, so the idea that he would set out without water does not survive contact with his own habits.

See also

- Abu Zubaydah Capture
- Abu Zubaydah
- George Tenet
