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The Saudis do get ever improving marks from Washington for their efforts to shut down the flow of funds to terrorist groups. Riyadh has prohibited Saudi charities from sending money abroad without government permission. It has frozen $5.7 million in bank accounts suspected of having links to terrorism. It has restricted the activities of more than half a dozen charities, including the controversial al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, whose Somalia and Bosnia branches, Washington and Riyadh concluded, were supporting terrorist activities. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told TIME, "The money aspect is now completely controlled, and your government knows it."
That's an overstatement. For one thing, no one expects the flow of terrorist money to be cut off entirely, given the inventiveness of funding organizations and the fact that they often deal in cash. "It is sort of like trying to stamp out crabgrass," says Robert Jordan, U.S. ambassador to Riyadh. "As soon as you stamp one of them out, something springs up somewhere else under a different name."
Also, the Saudis have offered only "selective cooperation" on the financial front, according to a senior U.S. official. A former Bush Administration official says the Saudis generally insist on knowing everything the Americans know before moving against a suspect. U.S. investigators, he says, sometimes suspect that the Saudis are fishing, trying to ferret out details of U.S. intelligence, or stalling, to protect Saudi individuals from embarrassment. One of the Administration's top counterterrorism officials says the Saudis still appear to be protecting charities associated with the royal family and its friends. He says the bank records of a charity suspected of being an al-Qaeda front mysteriously disappeared. The Americans hope a new joint task force, created at the suggestion of Prince Abdullah and based in Riyadh, will make better cooperation on finances more automatic.
U.S. officials tend to praise the Saudis' recent sweeps of al-Qaeda cells. "We are now seeing excellent cooperation with U.S. personnel in this fight here in the kingdom," says Jordan. "The Saudis are sharing to a much greater degree the results of interrogations and on a much more timely basis." Another U.S. official refers to a "fire hose" of intelligence flowing out of the crackdown. "We know a lot more about how al-Qaeda operates in Saudi Arabia," he says. "We are getting information on its logistics, financing, operational planning and relations with al-Qaeda leaders outside the kingdom."
The counterterrorism official, however, says the Saudi government has demonstrated a lack of openness in some areas, causing him to wonder what it has to hide. For example, the official tells TIME, the Saudis have denied U.S. officials access to several suspects in custody, including a Saudi in detention for months who had knowledge of extensive plans to inject poison gas in the New York City subway system. U.S. officials want to talk to him to determine how far the plot advanced and whether he had associates in the U.S. The Saudis have provided no detailed information about him.