Pay Any Price (12 page)

Deena Burnett was one of the first Americans to be shocked into the war on terror. But once she recovered from the immediate trauma of losing her husband, she had the courage to find her voice and become a leading spokeswoman for the group that would become known as the 9/11 families. Despite Bush's declaration of war, many of these families were eager to seek accountability through a more conventional path. In particular, Tom Burnett's father was driven by a determination to sue anyone responsible for funding or supporting the terrorists who had murdered his son. And so, in November 2001, Deena Burnett called Ronald Motley, a South Carolina lawyer famed for securing the largest class-action settlement in U.S. history with a victory over the tobacco industry.

At the time, Ron Motley was like a shark out of water. In the late 1990s, no lawyer in America had been more celebrated, more triumphant. He had won the largest legal victory ever in the United States, bringing Big Tobacco to its knees through a $246 billion settlement with a group of states' attorneys general. But in the years since that historic victory, he had been restless, and by September 11, 2001, he was searching for his next big case.

 

Motley took Deena Burnett's call and agreed to fight a legal battle against terrorism, much to the chagrin of Joseph Rice, the partner who kept an eye on the bottom line at their firm, Motley Rice. Rice knew how difficult it would be to ever repeat their tobacco success.

But Ron Motley would not be swayed. He was going to take on Saudi Arabia, the richest oil kingdom on earth, a country with more political influence in Washington than almost any other foreign power. It was also the native country of fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11, and there was a widespread belief in the United States that wealthy Saudis had been financing terrorism for years. The Saudis, Motley was convinced, were behind 9/11, and he was going to hold them accountable.

On August 15, 2002, at a Washington press conference, standing with Deena Burnett and other 9/11 family members by his side, Motley announced that he had filed a trillion-dollar lawsuit—
Burnett et al. v. Al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation et al.
—accusing Saudi banks, charities, and even members of the Saudi royal family of financing Osama bin Laden's reign of terror.

Now all Ron Motley had to do was prove it.

 

Motley realized that in order to jump-start his massive legal assault on the Saudi elite, he would need evidence to prove that the defendants had actually financed terrorism. He would have to back up his claims that there were significant ties between the Saudi financial elite and al Qaeda.

To help him in the hunt, Motley decided he needed to hire his own investigators. He wanted to create his own intelligence service, built from the ground up, to unlock the secrets of 9/11. He was determined to bring together the greatest collection of antiterrorism experts outside of the CIA, experts who were willing to take on the oil-rich Saudis in a way that the Bush administration was not. But Ron Motley could never have guessed what he would end up with instead.

 

As he started to assemble his investigative team, Motley first turned to a French writer and analyst who claimed to have ties to French intelligence.

The 9/11 attacks brought a sudden burst of notoriety for Jean-Charles Brisard. Just two months after the attacks, he published one of the first books to deal with 9/11, one that made sensational accusations against the Saudis. In
Forbidden Truth,
published in France in November 2001, Brisard named banks, charities, and individuals in Saudi Arabia that he claimed were responsible for funding al Qaeda. He took particular aim at one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia—Khalid bin Mahfouz.

Brisard devoted an entire chapter of his book to bin Mahfouz, whom he dubbed “the Banker of Terror.” “The bin Mahfouz financial and charity network is one of the most active in facilitating Osama bin Laden's activities,” Brisard wrote. In a separate paper he published in 2002, which he said was submitted to the president of the United Nations Security Council, Brisard named bin Mahfouz as one of seven prominent Saudis who were the “main individual sponsors of terrorism.”

For Ron Motley, who knew virtually nothing about Saudi Arabia,
Forbidden Truth
provided a road map to follow as he put together his case in 2002. Motley took the Saudi organizations and individuals identified in Brisard's book—including Khalid bin Mahfouz—and named them as defendants in the
Burnett
case.
Forbidden Truth
became Ron Motley's bible.

Brisard said that he first met with the Motley Rice lawyers in June 2002, before the 9/11 lawsuit was filed, during a trip to Washington to testify before Congress. Jodi Flowers, a Motley Rice lawyer and one of Motley's key lieutenants, contacted Brisard and arranged for him to meet with Motley and a group of lawyers at a Washington hotel where they talked about terrorism financing for three hours. At the end of the session, Motley asked Brisard to work for him. As Motley Rice was preparing its lawsuit, Brisard helped the lawyers to identify potential defendants, he recalls.

“They were basing the names of the defendants on my writings,” said Brisard. “I was participating in the selection process of defendants.” Soon, Brisard set up a five-member team in Paris to launch a global hunt for documents that could establish financial links between wealthy Saudi institutions and al Qaeda. He began reaching out to his contacts in governments throughout Europe, seeking access to their files on al Qaeda. Brisard's biggest coup was acquiring what became known as “the golden chain,” a document that was to become a key part of Motley's case as well as one of the most widely disputed pieces of evidence of Saudi complicity in terrorism financing.

In 2002, Bosnian police, working with the CIA, raided the Sarajevo offices of Benevolence International Foundation, an Islamic charitable organization. There, on a computer they found a document that purported to identify early financial backers of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The Justice Department used the document as evidence in a criminal case against Benevolence International in Chicago, and a key al Qaeda defector and informant, Jamal al-Fadl, testified that it was authentic and dubbed it “the golden chain.”

Brisard traveled to Bosnia in 2003 to try to get the golden chain and other Benevolence files from the Bosnian government. He was armed with formal legal requests from U.S. District Judge James Robertson, the federal judge in Washington who was then presiding over Motley's lawsuit against the Saudis. The Bosnians were willing, but the Justice Department wanted the documents to be used exclusively for its criminal case in Chicago. The Justice Department finally agreed only after the president of the Bosnian Supreme Court issued an order asking the Americans to share the documents with the Motley Rice team.

The biggest problem, however, was that it was virtually impossible to prove whether the golden-chain document was genuine. No one could say who wrote it, exactly when it was written, or what the list of names really meant. It was supposedly a list of donors to bin Laden's efforts to support Arab fighters in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Yet at that time, support for anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan was official American and Saudi policy. So, it was difficult to show whether the golden-chain document was really a smoking gun identifying al Qaeda's founding financial backers.

 

Meanwhile, Brisard's work came under scrutiny in Saudi Arabia. Khalid bin Mahfouz was not amused by
Forbidden Truth
or by the fact that Brisard's book was now providing the blueprint for a massive American lawsuit blaming him for financing 9/11. Bin Mahfouz was an angry billionaire with plenty of lawyers, and by 2003, he had decided to sue Brisard for libel. Other defendants in the
Burnett
case followed his lead and also filed libel cases against Brisard. Soon the French investigator was fending off lawsuits in Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Britain.

To Brisard and Motley, the libel suits against Brisard's book appeared to be a Saudi counterattack on the 9/11 lawsuit. “No one sued me until I started working for Motley Rice,” said Brisard. “It was obvious they were targeting me as the lead investigator for Motley Rice.”

Ultimately, Brisard was able to fend off the libel suits in every country—except Britain. There he didn't put up a fight, other than to argue that he had not authorized the publication of his book in England. The libel laws in Britain at the time were notoriously difficult for authors, so he defaulted. As part of a settlement with bin Mahfouz, Brisard issued an extensive apology and recanted many of the assertions he had made in his book and in the report that he said he had submitted to the president of the UN Security Council.

Brisard also had to acknowledge that he had done some editing of the golden-chain document. Among the names of purported al Qaeda financiers listed in the document was someone named “bin Mahfoodh,” and Brisard was forced to admit in his court-ordered apology that in the English translation of the document he had amended the name to read “Khalid bin Mahfouz.” He said he had changed the name because he believed that it made the document more accurate. “I inserted the forename Khalid before bin Mahfouz in the amended translation, but I accept that the reality is that the name Khalid is not contained within the original Arabic document,” Brisard admitted.

In fact, Brisard had to make a series of admissions of error—including that he had gotten it completely wrong when he wrote that Khalid bin Mahfouz was Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law. It was a brutal setback not only for Brisard but also for Ron Motley.

But Ron Motley wasn't willing to give up. He hired Michael Asimos, a bearded, long-haired former army officer and stockbroker who at first seemed perfectly suited to roam the world and hunt down the smoking gun Motley so desperately wanted in order to take down the Saudis.

 

Years later, it was difficult for the Motley Rice lawyers to explain exactly how Asimos had arrived at their doorstep. It was also difficult for them to describe who he was, or why he had come. To this day, they aren't certain whom he was really working for. Like the itinerant soldier in
The Return of Martin Guerre,
Asimos could become whatever people wanted him to be.

In that, Asimos was hardly alone in the post-9/11 world. He was one of many dream weavers who flourished in Washington's global war on terror, cashing in on the counterterrorism gold rush. What the stock market and the Internet bubble were to the 1990s, the counterterrorism bubble was to the first years of the new millennium, and there was a cadre of men willing and able to take advantage.

Asimos was tall, broad-shouldered, bright, and articulate, with a presence at once friendly yet slightly conspiratorial, as if just being with him lets you in on a secret. When he met Ron Motley and the other lawyers involved in the 9/11 case, he struck them as a secret agent straight out of central casting. For tort lawyers whose idea of combat was a long day in a courtroom—lawyers who had learned most of what they knew about war from the movies—Mike Asimos seemed like Rambo come to life. He was the kind of guy they all wanted to be in high school. To Motley Rice, he appeared to have come out of nowhere at just the right time.

Born in 1961, the son of a Greek owner of a diner in York, Pennsylvania, Asimos went to West Point, where he joined the Arabic language club and was jokingly nicknamed “the Envoy” in his West Point yearbook because of his interest in the Middle East. The yearbook suggests that, even while in college, he had already developed a reputation for being a little bit mysterious. “Whether it was drill, intramurals, or a DPE [physical education] test, ‘As' wasn't there,” read his yearbook inscription. “The ‘book' grew throughout the years, but a whole chapter was needed to explain how ‘the Envoy' missed finals for another Middle East vacation. If he wasn't in the air assisting the U.S. resolve the Middle East crisis, he was on the road cruising to good times in his car—if it wasn't loaned out! Mount up!”

Asimos graduated from West Point in 1984, and by 1987, he was assigned to the staff of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, the training center for army Special Operations, according to his military records. In 1989, he received a meritorious service medal for his work on Special Operations training programs. He left active duty in July 1989 with the rank of captain. He remained in the reserves until 1998.

While he was in the army, Asimos experienced a strange firsthand encounter with an al Qaeda mole inside the U.S. military. At Fort Bragg, Asimos met Sgt. Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian Army officer who had briefly been in contact with the CIA, which was interested in recruiting him as an asset. Mohamed had later immigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army. After the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Mohamed was arrested and charged with conspiracy to aid terrorism. It turned out he was secretly Osama bin Laden's chief of security, and had come to the United States in order to infiltrate the army and get to know American security tactics and methods.

Asimos was quoted by the
New York Times
in its first story disclosing the existence of the government's case against Mohamed. In a 1998 article Ben Weiser and I coauthored, Asimos recalled how, while he was stationed at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center in 1988, he had given Sergeant Mohamed some unclassified maps of Afghanistan for a trip he said he was planning to take on his own time to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviets. “I remember Ali coming back at some point in 1988 and telling me how much Ahmad Shah Massoud [an Afghan rebel leader] was pleased that I took him some maps,” Asimos said in the
Times
article. Asimos also told the
Times
that in 1988, he had been running a classified war game at Fort Bragg, and that he warned participants to be careful what they said in front of Mohamed, who did not have a security clearance.