The Saudi flights

The Commission said it found “no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001.” [1]

On politics, it found the request reached Richard Clarke, who said he approved it on the condition that the FBI was satisfied. Clarke told it, “I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House.” None of the officials interviewed recalled any intervention by a political appointee. [1]

On screening, the FBI checked passengers against databases and interviewed people of interest before the flights left. The Commission’s own review confirmed “no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights.” [1]

The most specific version of the story is a small plane from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, said to have flown while the skies were closed. The Commission traced it. On 13 September, Tampa police took three young Saudis they had been guarding on an off-duty detail to the airport, and the party left on a chartered Learjet at 4:37 p.m., after national airspace had reopened and more than five hours after the Tampa airport had. The pilot said there was “nothing unusual whatsoever” about it and that he filed a normal flight plan. [1]

After airspace reopened, nine chartered flights carried 160 people, mostly Saudis, out of the country between 14 and 24 September. The best known, the so-called bin Laden flight, left on 20 September with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Osama bin Laden, stopping in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Orlando, Washington Dulles and Boston. An FBI agent tracked it at every stop. [1]

Critics have a real point about depth. The Commission noted that most passengers on the Saudi flights were not interviewed, although 22 of the 26 on the bin Laden flight were. Two passengers on that flight had been subjects of FBI preliminary investigations, closed in 1999 and March 2001 because nothing linked them to terrorism, and the cases were not reopened. Whether quicker departures meant lost leads is a fair question the record cannot answer. [1][2]