testified on this issue on October 9, 2002:
On the issue of al-Qa'ida and Saudi intelligence, that goes back to our efforts to interact with the Saudi to get them to help is on investigating al-Qa'ida...For the most part it was a very troubled relationship where the Saudis were not providing us quickly or very vigorously with response to it. Sometimes they did, many times they didn't. It was just very slow in coming.
Both FBI and CIA personnel cited an individual named Madani al-Tayyib as a specific case in which the Saudis were uncooperative. The CIA and the FBI had been pressuring the Saudis for years for permission to talk to al-Tayyib. According to the former head of ALEC Station, al-Tayyib managed all of Bin Ladin's finances when Bin Ladin was in Sudan, and any expense over $1,000 had to be approved by al-Tayyib. Al-Tayyib moved to London in 1996 to work with Khalid al-Fawwaz, another important al-Qa'ida figure who has since been arrested. In the summer of 1996, al-Tayyab returned to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis continuously refused the FBI's and the CIA's request to talk to al-Tayyib, stating, in the words of an FBI agent, that al-Tayyib was "just a poor man who lost his leg. He doesn't know anything."
The former chief of Alec Station also cited the example of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. Khalifa is Bin Ladin's brother-in-law and an important figure in al-Qa'ida. The U.S. Government arrested Khalifa in the United States in 1994. Khalifa had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Jordanian Government for his role in a bombing in Jordan. As a result, the U.S. agreed to extradite him to Jordan. The Jordanians then returned him to Saudi Arabia. In the opinion of the CIA officer, the Saudis "bought off" the Jordanians for the return of Khalifa. According to the CIA officer, when Khalifa subsequently arrived in Saudi Arabia, he was met by at least one important government official. Khalifa now works for a Riyadh-based NGO and travels and operates freely.
The General Counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department testified at the July 23, 2002 hearing about the lack of Saudi cooperation with the U.S.:
