The Strange Case of Mohdar Abdullah

Did the U.S. government consider designating San Diego college student Mohdar Abdullah (left) as an enemy combatant after the 9/11 attacks?

The suggestion appears in one of several 9/11 Commission memoranda that were recently released by the National Archives and that make it clear that U.S. authorities viewed Abdullah as a major threat. An enemy combatant designation would have allowed President Bush to order Abdullah detained indefinitely in Guantanamo or military brig.

Ten days after the attacks, Abdullah was arrested as a material witness to the 9/11 attacks and shipped off to New York. Prosecutors there considered charging him along with Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving life in prison for conspiring to kill Americans in the 9/11 attacks but ultimately decided not to.

Commission documents show that Abdullah presented a dilemma for the government, which believed that he knew much more about the attacks than he would admit, but lacked sufficient evidence to support a terrorism charge. Abdullah was charged with visa fraud and deported to Yemen in 2004.

“If anyone in San Diego had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks it would be Abdullah,” one unnamed FBI agent told the Commission.

Abdullah had befriended the two hijackers when they lived in San Diego in 2000 and admitted helping the two men obtain state identification, contacting flight schools on their behalf and translating for them. Abdullah knew the pair had extremist leanings and sympathized with them, according to the 9/11 Commission’s final report. After Hazmi after he left San Diego, he remained in contact with Hazmi.

For three weeks before the attacks, Abdullah had been acting strangely. Several witnesses described him as nervous, paranoid and anxious. He stopped using the phone and didn’t show up at work or school.

On the morning of Sept. 10 at the Texaco station where Abdullah worked, an FBI source reporting hearing Abdullah saying something like, “It’s finally going to happen.” That night, Abdullah wanted to marry a young woman he had met a few months earlier, according to FBI Special Agent Daniel Gonzales.

Much later, Abdullah’s fellow inmates told the FBI that he had bragged to them of advance knowledge of the attacks, but authorities couldn’t substantiate the reports.

Abdullah denied foreknowledge of the attacks.

Gonzales described Abdullah as “a ‘slick’ and charismatic ‘liar.’” The unnamed San Diego FBI agent described Abdullah as a “goofball” and didn’t think he was a willing facilitator for the hijackers.

In their efforts to deport Abdullah, U.S. authorities were “running against the clock,” Justice Department officials told 9/11 Commission staffers in 2004.

Exactly what this means is unclear. The full explanation remains classified, but there’s no doubt that authorities didn’t want to let Abdullah go.

“The fear was a worst-case scenario where the opportunity to deport disappears, criminal charges do not materialize, and Abdullah succeeds in his habeas petition and is walking the streets,” Jonathan Cohn of the Justice Department told Commission staffers.

The return of Soviet-style "active measures?"

Was Iran really the target of the planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic? Or was it Russia?

President Obama announced today that he was scrapping Bush administration plans to locate a radar system and 10 ground-based interceptors in Eastern Europe that were aimed, he insisted, at Iran — not Russia.

But a better question might be: Does it really matter?

Plans to build a midcourse radar in the Czech Republic (with Raytheon serving as prime contractor) stirred up massive opposition. A fascinating view on this comes from the Czech intelligence service, the BIS, which has been publicly reporting for several years about the anti-radar campaign.

In its 2007 annual report, the BIS reported that Russia’s foreign intelligence services were active in the Czech Republic:

Last year’s operations of the Russian services in the Czech Republic were mainly related to the plan of building components of the US anti-missile defence system in our country, and to Russian disputes with Baltic states. Efforts to set up concealed channels of influence in the frame of Czech government and political structures continue unabated.

In the first place, the Russian services attempted to establish contacts with public opinion-makers, political circles and the media and infiltrate organizations influencing public opinion to win them over for supporting Russian interests in debates on the issue of locating an American radar in the Czech Republic.

One of these concealed channels may have been the No to the Bases movement, which includes MIT professor Noam Chomsky on its list of supporters. No to the Bases has denied any involvement from Russia, but Czech intelligence believes the group’s well-intentioned supporters are actually unwitting pawns of Russia. The BIS reportedly was highly suspicious of free billboards given to the campaign.

The BIS reported in 2008 that Russian intelligence activity had reached a high level of intensity, and had returned to the “Soviet practice of active measures” — propaganda and disinformation — “as an important instrument for promoting foreign-policy interests of Russia in the world.” The BIS compared the efforts to 20th century Soviet espionage practices successfully applied to influence the peace movement in Western Europe.

In this CNN interview, retired Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB operations in the US, described these “active measures” as “the heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence. The goal, he said, was to “weaken” the military, economic and psychological climate in the West.

In this sense, whether or not the missiles were aimed at Russia was almost irrelevant. The Czech radar had become part of Russia’s  broader geo-strategic campaign of gaining influence in the region, according to the BIS:

Seen in a wider context, their aim is not only to feed opposition against the radar, but also to create an impression that under the patronage of the EU and NATO the Nazi ideology is being rehabilitated in Europe and the decisive contribution of the Soviet Union to the defeat of Nazism in the World War II is being denied.

One example of this could be the recent release of what Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR, said were documents showing Poland’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II.

According to BIS, the operations of the Russian services targeted at the Czech Republic and its allies may be a part of a broader and prolonged campaign designed to undermine the EU and NATO integrity, isolate the United States (or encourage isolationist moods in the USA) and regain control over the security of the once Soviet-ruled territories in Europe, irrespective of the results of the anti-missile radar negotiations.

With today’s move, the Obama administration certainly didn’t give Russia any reason to think its campaign wasn’t working.

Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz

Writing anything about Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz used to be a bit of a risk. The billionaire Saudi banker issued a sheaf of libel writs to obscure writers and forced them to retract their stories and apologize. But the Saudi’s days of using British courts to clear his name are now buried in Jeddah along with 60-year-old Sheikh Khalid himself.

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He was one of the world’s wealthiest men and, at one time, he was the most powerful banker in the Middle East — King Fahd’s personal banker, it was said. Sheikh Khalid inherited his vast wealth from his father, an illiterate money-changer from Yemen who founded what became Saudi Arabia’s leading bank, the National Commercial Bank.

An intensely private man, Sheikh Khalid spent considerable sums in London’s plantiff-friendly courts to prove what he was not. He was not a financier of terrorism. He was not Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law. No, he was not an investor in George W. Bush’s Harken Energy. The allegations continued to dog him nonetheless.

That he was involved in the BCCI scandal, however, is beyond doubt. Sheikh Khalid was a director and major investor in the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. He did deny that he knew anything about what the bank of Manuel Noriega, terrorist Abu Nidal, the Medellin cartel, and the CIA was really up to.

Prosecutors in New York thought otherwise. A state grand jury indicted him in 1992 on criminal charges of conspiring to steal $300 million from BCCI depositors. The Federal Reserve accused Sheikh Khalid of misleading American regulators and closed the New York branch of the National Commercial Bank.

The charges were a deep embarrassment to the royal family. There were rumors that the House of Saud had borrowed huge sums from National Commercial Bank, perhaps as much as $3 billion, according to False Profits, a book on the BCCI scandal. King Fahd summoned U.S. Ambassador Charles Freeman “to express his surprise and dismay that a local prosecutor in New York City had indicted Sheik Khalid,” The New York Times reported. The king also made an extraordinary request: Would the United States issue a statement supporting the Saudi banking system? The ambassador refused.

To make the charges go away, Sheikh Khalid paid $225 million, including a $37 million fine (which he insisted was not a fine.)  While under investigation, Sheikh Khalid and his family had bought Irish passports. A helpful Citibank vice president supplied a reference, describing the sheikh as “the most important and respected client with Citicorp Private Bank in the UK and Channel Islands and one of the most valued clients of the bank globally.”

With the charges behind him, Sheikh Khalid reemerged as chairman and sole owner of his family’s bank. According to Forbes magazine, however, Sheikh Khalid oversaw a “dramatic” increase in the bank’s nonperforming loans, some of which were made to Sheikh Khalid himself. In 1999, the Saudi government acquired control of National Commercial Bank.

Sheikh Khalid remained in the public eye, however. He was a favorite of conspiracy theorists because of his connections, however indirect, to both the Bush family and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

In the 1970s, his U.S. legal representative was James R. Bath, a dealmaker who served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush. Bath introduced Sheikh Khalid, Bath, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally bought Main Bank of Houston.

Sheikh Khalid spent the last decade in seclusion, using his emissaries to stamp out reports that linked him to terrorism. Much was made of the Muwafaq Foundation, a charity Sheik endowed in 1991. A trustee of the foundation, Yassin al-Qadi, was listed by the U.S. government as a financier of terrorism. Sheikh Khalid, once again, insisted he knew nothing about what others had done with his money.

Texas was no hospitable for Sheikh Khalid, and his foreign base shifted to London.  According to news reports, a lawsuit in London revealed that Sheikh Khalid had acquired a London mansion in 1996 without his family’s knowledge. Sheikh Khalid planned to stay in the 97-room apartment in Mayfair with his young male friend, Khalid Ganzal.

Sheikh Khalid exemplified the conflicted realities U.S-Saudi relationship, a mutual dependence of powerful interests built on murky deals. He was not a royal but he was part of the inner sanctum of wealth and power in Saudi Arabia, and one pathway to the royals went through him. Even as he battled criminal charges, Sheikh Khalid continued to serve  powerful interests in the United States, remaining a consultant to Boeing Co., which sought an extremely lucrative contract from Saudi Arabia.

If there was wheeling and dealing to be done with the House of Saud, Sheikh Khalid was your man.