(Moment) John Loftus - Several friends inside [U.S.] military intelligence have told me that Jonathan Pollard gave the Israelis a roster that listed the identities of all the Saudi and other Arab intelligence agents we knew about as of 1984. (This has been corroborated by Israeli sources, as well.) At that time, this list, known in intelligence circles as the "blue book," would have been relatively unimportant to the U.S. - but not to Israel. Since 9/11, however, Pollard's "blue book" is of profound interest to the U.S. These particular agents are now a major embarrassment to the Saudis and to the handful of American spy chiefs who had employed these Saudi intelligence agents on the sly. Some of the names on this list - such as Osama Bin Laden - turned out to be leaders of terrorist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and what we now call al Qaeda. During the Reagan-Bush administrations, we asked the Saudis to recruit a proxy army of Islamic terrorists to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan, whom we would supply with guns and pay indirectly, according to intelligence sources. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, but the Saudis kept the terrorists on the payroll. From the Saudi perspective, it was safer to keep paying the terrorist groups to attack Israel, Bosnia, or Chechnya rather than letting them all back into Saudi Arabia. As one U.S. intelligence bureaucrat cynically confided to me, "Sure we knew that the Saudis were giving money to terrorist groups, but they were only killing Jews, they weren't killing Americans." Whenever the FBI or CIA came close to uncovering the Saudi terrorist connection, their investigations were mysteriously terminated. I can only conclude that some of our own Washington bureaucrats have been protecting the al Qaeda leadership and their oil-rich Saudi backers from investigation for more than a decade. John O'Neill, our nation's top al Qaeda expert, stated in a 2001 book that everything we wanted to know about terrorism could be found in Saudi Arabia. O'Neill warned repeatedly that if the Saudis were to continue funding al Qaeda, it would end up costing American lives, according to several intelligence sources. Outraged by the Saudi cover-up, O'Neill quit the FBI, became the new chief of security at the World Trade Center, and was himself killed by al Qaeda on 9/11.
2003-05-30 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive