This disturbing background shows that Prince Bandar was connected to the 9/11 attacks, but protected by US authorities; that he was the White House's point-man to launch the wider US-Saudi covert arrangement to fund al-Qaeda affiliated groups (coinciding with bin Laden's move to Abbottabad with Saudi funding); and that by 2011, he was privy to Pakistan's harbouring of al-Qaeda's leader and the US-Pakistan arrangement that led to his assassination.
Throughout this period, senior US intelligence officials have said that Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing the very al-Qaeda terror activity that Saudi Arabia was busy financing, while also financing bin Laden's ISI-controlled base in Abbottabad.
"This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control center for al Qaeda's top leader and it's clear" that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group," said one official. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions."
That claim is consistent with information on bin Laden's activity contained in the Afghan War logs. The overwhelming implication, and the consistent role of Prince Bandar in the alignment of these events, is that the US-backed Saudi programme to "control" who bin Laden-affiliated Salafis "throw bombs" at, gave bin Laden a free-hand to accelerate his terrorist activity under the auspices of the ISI.
The US-led strategy had, it seems, enabled the Saudi-Pakistani arrangement with the al-Qaeda founder as a matter of geopolitical convenience to undermine Iran.
Credible reports of bin Laden's connections to the Haqqani network also point to the role of the Saudi and Pakistani states in protecting bin Laden.
Two months before the US raid on his Abbottabad mansion, a BBC interview with senior officials of the Haqqani network confirmed a meeting with Osama bin Laden in Chitral in the northwest Pakistan frontier region.
The Haqqani network points directly to the ISI. In his testimony before the US Senate in September 2011, then outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said that "credible intelligence" confirms that "the Haqqani network" acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency."
This intelligence goes back many years. In 2008, for instance, confidential NATO reports and US intelligence assessments circulated among senior White House officials confirmed that Pakistan's ISI at the highest levels had provided military support to Taliban insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who according to Hersh was complicit in protecting bin Laden in Abbottabad, had been identified as sanctioning provision of military aid to insurgents affiliated to bin Laden.
In fact, US and British intelligence analyses from just before 9/11 right up until the bin Laden raid not only show that the ISI has supported such al-Qaeda linked insurgent groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout that period, but that US and British officials were well aware of the same.
Various credible sources report that the Haqqani network, with assistance from the ISI, had played a key role in bin Laden's escape from the Tora Bora complex in 2001 into Pakistan in the wake of the US bombing campaign.
In the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins cites Afghanistan's intelligence chief from 2004 to 2010, Amrullah Saleh, who told him that ISI operative Syed Akbar Sabir had escorted bin Laden from Chitral to Peshawar in Pakistan: "We believed that he was part of the ISI operation to care for bin Laden."
Another ISI agent, Fida Muhammad, had confessed to the Afghans that he had been escorting Haqqani insurgents from Pakistan into Afghanistan to fight the NATO occupation for the previous decade. But his most "memorable" job was in December 2001, when he participated in a major ISI covert operation"--"sanctioned at the highest levels"--"to help al-Qaeda fighters escape from Tora Bora.
There were dozens of ISI teams operating on the ground at the time who successfully evacuated as many as 1,500 militants from Tora Bora and other jihadist camps.
In his New Yorker story, Filkins quotes former CIA counter-terrorism officer Bruce Riedel on former ISI chief Nadeem Taj, whom he described as being "deeply involved with Pakistani militants, particularly those fighting against India."
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