Osama … we hardly knew you. Osama Bassnan, a Saudi government intelligence officer according to the FBI, throws a Washington, DC party for Omar Abdel Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” who is now living in New York. This is four months before the first bombing of the World Trade Center and well before there was much recognition of al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.
An FBI asset is at the party, and according to the famed “28 pages” (the deleted material from the 9/11 Commission report that is finally released in 2016), Bassnan “made many laudatory remarks … about bin Ladin [sic], referring to Bin Ladin as … the ruler of the Islamic world.” According to the FBI asset, Bassnan spoke of Bin Laden “as if he were a god.” He also stated that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for students from the Middle East. He said that such measures were insufficient to stop Islam because there were already “enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”
In May 1992, according to former Sen. Bob Graham (Intelligence Matters, pp. 24-25), the State Department provided the FBI “with a box of documents recovered from an abandoned car.” In the box are a number of letters addressed to Osama Bassnan, a “Saudi spy … [later] suspected of being groomed to replace [Omar] al-Bayoumi in San Diego.” Graham says “the FBI did not open an investigation,” even after the October party.
Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi intelligence officer, “meets” the first two hijackers to enter the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—the would be pilots who arrived in Los Angeles and were helped by Bayoumi to settle in in San Diego. Bassnan would go on to live in the same apartment complex at Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Both Bassnan and Bayoumi would disappear before 9/11, and though Bayoumi was interviewed in Saudi Arabia by Commission staffers, their involvement in 9/11 remained shrouded in secret.