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 invest significant energy in cultivating what Abu Zubaydah called good relationships with Saudis of all standing...He said bin Ladin is very pleased when Saudis in the military, those successful in business and those close to the royal family to lend active support to his cause. He said bin Ladin actively seeks out such relationships.

Other CIA and FBI officials echoed these remarks in recent Congressional testimony.

stated:

"What we find troubling about the cases that we learned about from FBI, both the Los Angeles cases and some of the cases that the Washington Field Office has looked at, in which you're seeing Saudi money going to people, is that it fits sort of a pattern that we've seen in terms of direct payments from the Saudis, the Saudi Government's longstanding support for very fundamentalist Wahabi and Salafi charities and movements around the world, which in a sense you see the money is going to fundamentalists and you would be very surprised if some of its doesn't bleed over into terrorist support...We've had a lot of suspicions before September 11 which we documented in a number of different papers, and again it's a lot of smoke and the issues that come up are who knows about the payments, on whose behalf are the payments being made, are they being made on behalf of the central government or are they being made by a local official or a person. Do the people who are making the payments know what's happening to the money? If they do know what's happening, why are they making the payments? Is it a form of blackmail? Do they recognize the terrorist support? There's the issue of are they regulating themselves as well as are they doing the due diligence that they ought to."

FBI Executive Assistant Director Pasquale D'Amuro testified at that same hearing:

"To date I can't sit here and tell you that those ties go back, that we can prove that the Saudi royal family is sponsoring terrorism. But there's enough smoke that we are conducting several investigations to try to determine what other information is out there."

What is clear is that the FBI did not treat the Saudis as a counterterrorism threat prior to September 11, 2001.

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