Saudi officials may have been ‘advance team’ for 9/11 hijackers, declassified intel documents show

WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabian government employees may have served as an “advance team” for the Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four planes on Sept. 11, 2001, and ended up killing nearly 3,000 Americans, according to newly declassified intelligence files and former national security officials.

An FBI investigation conducted out of the New York Field Office found that the two Riyadh officials — Mutaib al Sudairy and Adel Mohammad al Sadhan — had a “past connection” to the hijackers and others who assisted them, according to a declassified Sept. 28, 2010, memo.

The Saudis seem to have prepared years before the arrival of two of the 9/11 hijackers — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000, working to feed, house and connect the terror operatives with others as they laid the groundwork for the attacks.

The records from Operation Encore — first reported by independent journalist Catherine Herridge and shared with The Post — show the lengths to which Al Qaeda went to prep the hijackers and place the beginnings of their plot against the US as far back as December 1998, when al Sadhan first came briefly to southern California.

Families of 9/11 victims have pursued the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in federal court since 2002 for Riyadh’s alleged involvement in the terror attacks. Last month, a Manhattan judge ruled that their complaint could proceed to trial based on the new “circumstantial evidence.”

After al Sadhan’s initial 1998 visit, he flew with al Sudairy to Washington, DC, in June 1999 before heading to San Diego, Calif., and staying for six weeks with a Saudi student, Omar al-Bayoumi, whom the FBI believes to have been an intelligence operative for Riyadh.

Fahad al-Thumairy, an imam at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, Calif., was listed as “a contact” for al Sadhan during that first visit to Los Angeles.

Al-Thumairy also later provided “assistance to Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar” — both of whom helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and fly it into The Pentagon on 9/11, the FBI files state.

Al-Thumairy, the imam, had been placed at the southern California mosque by Musaed al-Jarrah, director of Islamic affairs at the Saudi embassy in Washington.

Video footage from al Sadhan and al Sudairy’s 1999 Washington, DC, visit showed the Saudis filming the US Capitol and White House. Both landmarks were considered possible targets of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa. on Sept. 11 after passengers charged the cockpit.

While al Sadhan and al Sudairy were in southern California, al-Bayoumi “provided a place to live and looked after them,” according to the FBI files, “at the same address in San Diego where al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar would later stay near the Al-Ribat mosque.”

The imam at the Al-Ribat mosque was Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-Yemeni dual citizen and Al Qaeda operative assassinated in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen authorized by President Barack Obama.

In a subsequent document, a FBI source claimed there was a “50/50 chance” that Al-Bayoumi had “advanced knowledge” of 9/11.

Al Sadhan and al Sudairy later decamped to Lawrence, Kan., and Columbia, Mo., respectively, at some point in 2000, with the latter briefly attending an intensive English program at the University of Missouri, ostensibly to learn the language.

Both returned to Saudi Arabia in October 2001.

The FBI documents cited previously undisclosed phone records, financial information and interviews. The CIA was briefed on the details in February 2010, three years after Operation Encore was launched.

The FBI records also contain previously unreleased tapes of a February 2000 “welcome party” for some of the hijackers in California, during which another Saudi government official can be seen.

Bill Evanina, former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told Herridge in an interview released Tuesday that the files “provide new investigative leads” for the FBI and CIA to “put some more pieces together in this 9/11 puzzle.”

It’s unclear whether the Saudi employees were working on behalf of their government or “serving the needs of Al Qaeda,” Evanina said.

But the evidence “should have been provided to the 9/11 Commission,” he noted, since US intelligence had already obtained the videos of the Saudis’ visit in fall 2001.

“I think these records clearly depict, not only the advance team coming here to the United States and setting up shop,” Evanina claimed, “facilitating the care and feeding and housing of the hijackers.”

“That really moves the timeline back significantly to when the support network actually got on the ground here in the United States.”

Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told Herridge he could not recall if he had ever seen the full, 30-minute video of the “welcome party” for the hijackers.

“I still believe the overall summary we offered in our report, with all its acknowledged uncertainties, holds up reasonably well,” Zelikow said in a statement. “We identified concerns about at least five people as suspects for possible participation in a clandestine support network in the US.”

A spokesperson for the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington said in a statement that it “respectfully disagrees” with Manhattan US District Court Judge George Daniels’ ruling and its officials “believe it has solid grounds for appeal.”

The rep categorically denied claims that the Saudi government was involved in any way in preparations for the 9/11 attacks.

The CIA declined to comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.