Omar al-Bayoumi
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Omar al-Bayoumi was the Saudi national in southern California who housed and financed two of the 9/11 hijackers, and who is, in John Kiriakou's account, the clearest single thread running from the attacks back to the Saudi state.

Crawford

Kiriakou's shortest statement of the case is a question he says was never answered: why was al-Bayoumi at President Bush's Crawford ranch before 9/11, in the company of Crown Prince Abdullah, and why did he then excuse himself from that meeting to step outside and telephone the hijackers? "Why was that never investigated? It's because the CIA wouldn't let us investigate it. The CIA wouldn't let the 9/11 Commission investigate it."

The FBI file

The FBI investigated al-Bayoumi in 2015; the file was declassified in 2021. His own account, that he had met two of the hijackers by chance, did not survive contact with the witnesses, who described him standing at a window watching for the men, greeting them in Arabic, and sitting down with them. Kiriakou says the money reached al-Bayoumi as a $50,000 wire from the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and that he passed it to the hijackers to cover rent, food and possibly airline tickets. What settled the question for Kiriakou was al-Bayoumi's employment: he was a "ghost employee" of a Saudi airline company, drawing a salary that nobody could match to any work, from which Kiriakou concludes he was a Saudi intelligence officer.

Kiriakou also reads the official Saudi embassy response to the declassified documents as an admission by omission: it was worded to deny only that senior royal family members or senior officials had been involved, which he takes as an implicit acknowledgement of involvement further down. The money itself, he notes, moved through the Muslim World League, based in Jeddah, funded solely by the Saudi government despite presenting itself as an NGO, which he considers official Saudi government involvement on its own terms.

See also

- Saudi princes and 9/11
- 9/11 Commission
- George Tenet
