The meeting took place in the elegant offices of the Saudi Bin Laden Group. Shafiq and Abdullah, who had met with Newcomb at Treasury prior to September 11 to outline the history of Bin Laden inheritances, joined Bakr in his office. This time, instead of the business suits they had worn to the Treasury Annex in Washington, the two brothers appeared in traditional Saudi robes and headdresses. No one from Treasury had met Bakr before; they were struck by his relatively modest stature, at least in comparison to Osama.
Bakr apologized to the Americans about the September 11 attacks. He said that Osama was no longer considered a part of the Bin Laden family, and that he had been cut off for years. Bakr added that he had no idea where Osama was hiding. He offered the cooperation of his family and his company.
Newcomb and his colleagues walked through their presentation about American terrorist-financing laws. They tried to speak in a diplomatic, nonthreatening tone. They did not go into depth with Bakr about specific Bin Laden family or inheritance issues; Newcomb’s office believed the letter sent to Treasury by Sullivan & Cromwell in 2000 had adequately addressed these questions.
The Bin Laden brothers were cordial. Shafiq suggested to one member of the delegation that he come back when he wasn’t so busy so they could go fishing together in the Red Sea. In a more serious vein, one of the brothers mentioned that his American Express card had been blocked after September 11—he presumed this was because of the family name on the card. He wanted to go back to America, he said, but he could not do so without a working American Express card. One of the American officials joked that this was a pretty good advertisement for the credit card company.
Back in Washington, in the first weeks of 2002, Treasury officials discussed the credit card matter at the White House, where several interagency working groups convened on a weekly or biweekly basis to review global counterterrorism operations. The Taliban had fallen by now, intelligence operations against Al Qaeda were unfolding in dozens of countries, and preparations had quietly begun for an invasion of Iraq. In this interregnum the Bush administration was also focusing intently on terrorist-financing matters, and its interagency groups on terrorism reviewed many detailed case files. After the mission to Saudi Arabia, a sensitive question arose: Was the Bush administration prepared, at least provisionally, to clear Bin Laden family bank accounts and credit cards, so that members of the family resident in Saudi Arabia and Europe could travel more freely?2
U.S. government investigators had learned a great deal about the Bin Laden family in the several months since September 11, particularly about its business history in America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had carried out much of this work after the attacks in Washington and New York. Dennis Lormel, an agent with a background in financial crime investigations, had been appointed on September 13 to lead a team at FBI headquarters assigned to concentrate on the financial aspects of the September 11 plot, and more generally on Al Qaeda’s money trail. The FBI’s fifty-six field offices scattered around the United States also carried out investigations into the Bin Laden family, some in cooperation with Lormel’s group, others on a more ad hoc basis. On the evening of September 11 itself, for example, agents from the Boston field office turned up at the local condominium where Abdullah and his half-brother Mohamed had owned apartments; the FBI agents started what would become weeks of shoe-leather police work in the Boston area. They interviewed neighbors, investigated nightclubs and bars where younger Bin Ladens were said to appear on occasion, and dug for evidence about family money. Similar investigations, none of them announced to the public, took place in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. Through the autumn, FBI agents gathered an enormous sheaf of files and interview reports about the Bin Ladens, although as ever, the bureau struggled to pull its data together and deliver it in a way that policy makers outside the FBI could use.3
FBI agents and investigators from the nascent Department of Homeland Security spent long hours with some of the Bin Ladens’ key American business partners after September 11, talking through the minutia of each long-ago business transaction involving Salem, Khalil, Yeslam, and other brothers active in the United States. The agents examined where and how the money had flowed in these deals. The investigators also took flight logs from family pilots and interviewed some pilots at length about Bin Laden family travel history, reaching as far back as the 1970s. The FBI learned, for example, about the flight to Peshawar, Pakistan, by Gerald Auerbach and Ghalib Bin Laden early in 1989.4
These investigations amounted to intelligence collection; there were no grand juries convened to consider criminal charges. Some of the work fell inevitably into the gray area between the mandate of the FBI and that of the Central Intelligence Agency. Charles Tickle, who had directed commercial real estate investments in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere for Yeslam Bin Laden, telephoned the CIA switchboard on his own after the attacks. He volunteered to the operator, “We had business dealings with the Bin Laden family.” They asked a few questions and later called back to say, in effect, “No, everything’s good.”5
All this digging on American soil turned up no evidence of complicity by the Bin Laden family in terrorist violence. Dale Watson, the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism in the fall of 2001, concluded that the Bin Laden family “couldn’t help us and they were not a threat,” as he put it later. Dennis Lormel and his terrorist-finance team reached a similar judgment, although they felt there were a few areas of family activity where it was difficult to be conclusive.6
Because he was new to the subject, it took Lormel a while to unravel and move beyond the misleading U.S. intelligence reports he inherited, originating at the CIA, which described Osama’s supposedly vast personal fortune. Lormel and his team felt they could not simply accept at face value the Bin Laden family’s report, through Sullivan & Cromwell, about the size and timing of Osama’s inheritance and dividend payments—that account might well be correct, and the FBI had no specific reason to doubt it, but a letter from a family lawyer hardly counted as definitive evidence in a matter as important as Osama’s wealth. Where were the original documents? Where was the evidence that could hold up in a courtroom?
Another area that seemed to require additional investigation was the Swiss and offshore banking and investments overseen by Yeslam Bin Laden and other family partners and aides in Switzerland. After the September 11 attacks, Swiss and French investigators had initiated their own inquiries into Bin Laden bank accounts and investment vehicles in Switzerland and elsewhere. On March 27, 2002, Swiss police raided nine offices and companies connected to Yeslam Bin Laden, including his principal firm, Saudi Investment Company, in Geneva. They hauled away boxes and records, but ultimately filed no charges against him.7
Despite these lingering issues, the FBI’s counterterrorism investigators felt by early 2002 that they had no reason to argue for the continued blocking of Bin Laden family credit cards and checking accounts in the United States. The final decision, according to one person involved in the discussions, was carefully reviewed by interagency groups run by the National Security Council and approved at a very high level.8 Such a decision would almost certainly have required President Bush’s personal endorsement, although what role, if any, Bush actually played in the ruling is not known. What seems clear is that a specific decision was made at the White House sometime early in 2002: barring the emergence of new evidence, the U.S. government would not sanction the Bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.