In a federal court filing made last month, but not unsealed until last week, the FBI’s counterterrorism division accidentally revealed the name of an official from Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Washington who has long been suspected of assisting the al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
The name of Saudi embassy official Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah has been treated as highly sensitive for diplomatic and intelligence reasons for the past two decades. A spokesman for the group of 9/11 families involved in the court case called the disclosure a “giant screwup.”
The FBI hastily withdrew the filing, but the cat is already out of the bag. The Jerusalem Post noticed on Wednesday that Iranian and Turkish state media are gleefully spreading Jarrah’s name far and wide to embarrass the Saudi monarchy, which their own governments view as a regional rival for power.
“Al-Jarrah was a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC, in 1999 and 2000,” Turkey’s Andalou Agency reported. “He was in charge of supervising the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers in the US, according to the report.”
Andalou added that Jarrah’s current whereabouts are unknown, but speculated he might be back in Saudi Arabia. Yahoo News cited former embassy employees who said Jarrah was “reassigned to the Saudi missions in Malaysia and Morocco” after 9/11 and is believed to have been stationed in Morocco “as recently as last year.”
The court filing that identified Jarrah was made by FBI Assistant Director of Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn, appointed to her post by FBI Director Christopher Wray in January. Sanborn’s previous career in counterterrorism included experience in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Yahoo News found it “ironic” that the alleged purpose of Sanborn’s filing was to bolster the FBI’s argument that disclosing information such as “interview reports, telephone and bank records, source reporting documents and foreign government information” is harmful to ongoing counterterrorism efforts because it will make foreign governments more apprehensive about sharing sensitive information with American agencies.
The court filing in question reportedly referred to Jarrah several times, but redacted his name in every instance except one. As Yahoo News reported, the one time in Sanborn’s filing that Jarrah’s name was not blacked out was a reference to the 9/11 families demanding to know the name of the “third man” in a 9/11 conspiracy long ago identified by the FBI:
In a portion describing the material sought by lawyers for the 9/11 families, Sanborn refers to a partially declassified 2012 FBI report about an investigation into possible links between the al-Qaida terrorists and Saudi government officials. That probe, the existence of which has only become public in the past few years, initially focused on two individuals: Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi Islamic Affairs official and radical cleric who served as the imam of the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles and Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi government agent who assisted two terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who participated in the hijacking of the American Airlines plane that flew into the Pentagon, killing 125.
After the two hijackers flew to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000, al-Bayoumi found them an apartment, lent them money and set them up with bank accounts.
A redacted copy of a three-and-a-half page October 2012 FBI “update” about the investigation stated that FBI agents had uncovered “evidence” that Thumairy and Bayoumi had been “tasked” to assist the hijackers by yet another individual whose name was blacked out, prompting lawyers for the families to refer to this person as “the third man” in what they argue is a Saudi-orchestrated conspiracy.
Describing the request by lawyers for the 9/11 families to depose that individual under oath, Sanborn’s declaration says in one instance that it involves “any and all records referring to or relating to Jarrah.”
Jarrah was one of nine current and former Saudi officials long suspected of participating in the 9/11 conspiracy by families of the victims. A lawyer for the families said after the Jarrah disclosure that the legal team has “tried to go up the totem pole” and now has a list of 11 Saudi government officials they believe were involved in the attack.
Every U.S. administration since the 9/11 attack, including that of President Donald Trump, has been reluctant to divulge information about these alleged conspirators, in part because FBI agents say they lack the evidence to conclusively prove Jarrah and others were knowingly colluding with al-Qaeda, and they have little hope the Saudi government will ever allow them to question the subjects.
The issue was brought into the 2020 presidential contest in October when former Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a military veteran, demanded the release of all information from the federal investigation into 9/11. Gabbard called for “not a highly redacted version of this information that makes no sense but a declassified version that actually speaks the truth of what led to the attack on 9/11.”
Yahoo News noted that the FBI has accumulated some new information about Muslim cleric Fahad al-Thumairy and his connections not available to the 9/11 Commission, which concluded there was no evidence of Saudi government involvement with the hijackers in its 2004 report.
Sanborn’s court filing was the first official connection made between the 9/11 conspiracy and a Saudi diplomatic employee. According to both Sanborn and other FBI agents familiar with the case, the information under seal falls short of conclusive proof that Jarrah knew he was working with al-Qaeda.
The UK Daily Mail recalled that after 9/11 families met with President Trump on September 11, 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr disclosed the long-sought name of the “third man” to their attorneys, but the name was not made public.
“This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” declared Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families who lost his own father in the attack.
Eagleson said he was astonished by the scale of the FBI’s accidental disclosure.
“It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy, to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, to the hijackers,” he said, referring to the Saudi government agency that oversees mosques and Islamic cultural centers both inside Saudi Arabia and internationally.
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