The 28 Pages Were Leads, Not Proof. 60 Minutes Let Suspicion Fill the Gaps.
Steve Kroft's 2016 investigation raised a legitimate and consequential question: did Saudi officials help two of the 9/11 hijackers establish themselves in California, and how far up the Saudi government did that assistance reach?
But the programme made a serious editorial mistake. It assembled a compelling picture of Saudi connections without adequately distinguishing what investigators had established, what intelligence agencies merely suspected, and what remained unproved.
The distinction matters. Helping two future terrorists settle in America is one finding. Knowing they were al-Qaeda operatives is another. Directing their assistance on behalf of the Saudi state is a third.
The broadcast repeatedly brought these propositions close together. It never adequately established the boundaries between them.
The 28 pages contained a warning the programme should have emphasised
The 28 pages were released on July 15, 2016, three months after the original broadcast. Their contents reveal a more complicated evidentiary position than the programme's dramatic presentation conveyed.
The congressional Joint Inquiry explicitly stated that it had not independently investigated the accuracy or significance of the Saudi-related information it had collected. Its purpose was to compile intelligence material and refer it to the FBI and CIA for further investigation.
Its own warning was unequivocal:
"This Joint Inquiry has made no final determinations as to the reliability or sufficiency of the information."
The document also acknowledged that further investigation might reveal legitimate, innocent explanations for the associations it described.
This was not a minor technical qualification. It defined what the document could legitimately establish.
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There was, nevertheless, substantial material worth investigating.
The inquiry described:
- Bayoumi receiving a monthly salary from a Saudi-linked aviation contractor despite reportedly appearing at the company only once.
- His financial allowances increasing substantially after the hijackers arrived in San Diego.
- Almost 100 telephone contacts with Saudi government establishments between January and May 2000, according to FBI records.
- Previous reports identifying him as a possible Saudi intelligence officer.
- His substantial logistical assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
These were not all equally established findings. Some were documented transactions, others intelligence reporting and allegations.
The Joint Inquiry itself distinguished the documentary evidence of Bayoumi's assistance from the less-established claims about his intelligence connections.
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60 Minutes described the material as a working draft containing verified and unverified evidence. That was useful, but insufficient. Viewers deserved to hear the actual committee's warning that it had not established the reliability of the wider Saudi allegations.
A classified intelligence lead is not a finding of state responsibility. The programme should have made that distinction impossible to miss.
The supposed chance meeting had a competing account
The programme devoted considerable attention to February 1, 2000.
Bayoumi visited the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, where Fahad al-Thumairy worked. He subsequently met Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar at a halal restaurant.
60 Minutes treated the coincidence with obvious suspicion.
Graham described the encounter as almost magical. The reporter questioned how Bayoumi could have happened upon two future hijackers in one of America's largest cities.
But the 9/11 Commission's published investigation contained an important detail absent from the broadcast.
Bayoumi was accompanied by Caysan Bin Don. Both men told investigators that they had travelled from San Diego to deal with consular business and encountered the hijackers while eating.
The commission found that their accounts corroborated each other in most respects, although Bin Don's recollection was inconsistent.
Its conclusion was:
"We do not know whether the lunch encounter occurred by chance or design."
The commission also explicitly stated that it had found no evidence that Thumairy provided assistance to the two hijackers, despite considering him a logical possible contact.
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This did not establish Bayoumi's innocence. Nor did it establish that the meeting was accidental.
It established that the question remained unresolved.
The broadcast's failure was presenting the suspicious interpretation without giving viewers the full contemporaneous evidentiary dispute.
Assistance, knowledge and government responsibility are different questions
The programme quoted the 9/11 Commission's finding that Saudi Arabia had long been considered a primary source of al-Qaeda funding.
It also quoted the commission's statement that investigators had found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually, funded al-Qaeda.
Attorney Sean Carter argued that this wording left open the possibility of assistance from lower-level officials.
That is a legitimate distinction.
But the commission made another finding that deserved equal attention.
Its investigation found no credible evidence that anyone in the United States provided the hijackers with substantial financial assistance. It also found no evidence that a foreign government or foreign government official supplied funding for the actual 9/11 plot.
The commission identified al-Qaeda itself as the source of the hijackers' operational funding.
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These findings do not rule out logistical assistance from Saudi-linked individuals. They do, however, make it essential to distinguish assistance with accommodation, introductions and everyday arrangements from financing the terrorist operation.
Graham's response when asked whether he meant the Saudi government, wealthy individuals and charities was:
"All of the above."
That is a sweeping description of responsibility.
The evidence needed to establish each category is different. The existence of Saudi-funded charities does not establish that the Saudi government directed an individual to assist al-Qaeda. An individual's intelligence affiliation does not automatically establish knowledge of a terrorist operation.
60 Minutes brought these subjects together without doing enough to show precisely where one ended and another began.
The Wahhabism argument substitutes a broad explanation for specific evidence
The programme introduced another argument through former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman.
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals, he noted. He argued that they had attended Saudi schools and learned an intolerant interpretation of Islam.
The report then expanded into a discussion of Wahhabism, Saudi religious institutions, international religious funding and schools allegedly becoming recruiting grounds for violent extremists.
There is a serious subject here. But the programme did not establish the specific connection it needed.
It identified no particular school attended by the hijackers, examined no individual curriculum, and traced no specific educational pathway from Saudi religious instruction to recruitment into the 9/11 operation.
Instead, it moved from the religious character of Saudi society to the existence of violent extremist networks.
That is not sufficient evidence of a connection to the specific people who assisted the hijackers.
Even the later court record demonstrates why precision matters. One former mosque employee described Thumairy as hostile towards Western culture and associated with anti-American individuals. Under deposition, however, he said he had never personally heard Thumairy express support for terrorism in his sermons. Other witnesses similarly denied hearing him express extremist or violent views.
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Those accounts do not settle Thumairy's role. They demonstrate that religious conservatism, anti-American sentiment and knowing participation in terrorism cannot simply be treated as interchangeable.
The programme needed to investigate the actual institutional and personal connections. Its broader ideological explanation was not a substitute.
Later FBI evidence substantially changed the Bayoumi question
There is an important reason not to dismiss the original programme's suspicions.
Subsequent investigations produced evidence considerably stronger than what the 2016 broadcast could publicly establish.
A June 14, 2017 FBI communication, released publicly in 2022, confirmed that Bayoumi had been paid as a co-optee of Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency.
The FBI document explained that Bayoumi collected information on individuals of interest in the Saudi community in Los Angeles and San Diego. That information was passed to then Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who forwarded matters of interest to Saudi intelligence.
The FBI explicitly stated that this information confirmed earlier allegations about Bayoumi's intelligence affiliation.
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This is a substantial development.
Bayoumi was not merely someone whose Saudi connections had attracted speculation. The FBI subsequently confirmed his intelligence relationship.
That finding does not independently establish that he knew the hijackers' intentions or that Saudi intelligence instructed him to facilitate the 9/11 operation. But it changes the evidentiary weight of his relationship with the Saudi state.
The original programme was right to investigate the connection. Its failure was not establishing what that connection actually meant.
A federal judge found the Saudi connection sufficiently credible to proceed
The most consequential development came on August 28, 2025.
Federal Judge George B. Daniels rejected Saudi Arabia's renewed attempt to dismiss the 9/11 families' lawsuit.
After extensive jurisdictional discovery, the court found that the evidence supported a strong inference that Bayoumi and Thumairy were doing more than performing their officially described jobs as an accountant and an imam.
The judge considered:
- Bayoumi's repeated interactions with the hijackers.
- His connections to Thumairy and other Saudi religious officials.
- Telephone contacts with Saudi government establishments.
- His assistance arranging accommodation and other practical support.
- A significant increase in his Saudi-funded compensation around the relevant period.
- Evidence that Thumairy had met the hijackers and communicated with Bayoumi.
The court concluded that, for the limited purpose of establishing jurisdiction, their Saudi employment likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.
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But this was not a final finding of Saudi government liability.
The judge explicitly called it a preliminary jurisdictional finding. The court acknowledged disputed facts, unresolved witness credibility and the need for a trial to determine the merits.
It also identified limits in the evidence. The contents of the relevant telephone calls were unknown, and the court considered it too great a step to conclude that the Saudi-linked individuals were an advance team sent to prepare for the hijackers.
Saudi Arabia continued to deny directing either man to assist the terrorists.
The distinction is important: the families had established a sufficient evidentiary basis to pursue their case, not a final judicial determination that Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11.
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Saudi Arabia appealed. On October 7, 2026, the Second Circuit heard arguments over whether the lawsuit could proceed. A written appellate decision remains pending.
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The more disturbing investigation may concern the FBI itself
There is another story that the original programme could not fully explore.
British police arrested Bayoumi shortly after 9/11 and searched his home and office in Birmingham. They seized more than 80 videotapes, documents, computer materials and other evidence.
An October 11, 2001 FBI memorandum recorded that copies of the recovered exhibits had been sent to the FBI.
Yet a May 2002 memorandum from the San Diego field office indicated that investigators had been asked to review only five of those videotapes. Two were duplicates.
The evidence was not widely shared with the agents most interested in investigating Bayoumi's activities.
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A later FBI investigation, Operation Encore, continued examining the Saudi connections. Its investigators reportedly faced resistance from FBI headquarters, and the team was disbanded in 2016.
In 2017, the FBI confirmed Bayoumi's intelligence affiliation, but the investigators who had pursued the Saudi connection did not see those memorandums until their release in 2022.
A September 2026 ProPublica investigation documented how much evidence had remained inaccessible to investigators and the victims' families for years.
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This does not prove a deliberate FBI cover-up.
The Department of Justice Inspector General had previously examined the FBI's 1998 preliminary inquiry into Bayoumi and concluded that closing it in 1999 was appropriate under the investigative restrictions then in force. The initial allegations had not been substantiated, and agents had limited authority to obtain financial records or conduct surveillance.
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But the subsequent handling of evidence seized in Britain raises a separate and much more serious question.
Why did investigators pursuing the Saudi connection not receive the complete evidentiary record? Why were important materials left outside their investigation? And why did the FBI's conclusions about Bayoumi's intelligence relationship take so long to become public?
These are questions about institutional accountability, not simply Saudi diplomacy.
The verdict: suspicion was justified, but the reporting needed a sharper standard of proof
The Saudi connection is not an imaginary controversy.
The FBI eventually confirmed Bayoumi's intelligence relationship. Later evidence strengthened the case that he and Thumairy had assisted the hijackers. A federal judge found sufficient evidence to allow the families' claims against Saudi Arabia to proceed.
But none of that makes every allegation true, establishes that senior Saudi leaders knew about the attacks, or turns a preliminary jurisdictional ruling into a final finding of state responsibility.
60 Minutes had an important story. It also had an obligation to distinguish investigative leads from established facts.
Instead, its presentation allowed the audience to move between individual assistance, intelligence relationships, religious ideology and government responsibility without adequately examining the evidentiary connections between them.
The most important unanswered question was never simply whether Saudi-linked individuals helped the hijackers.
It was who instructed them, what they knew, where their authority came from, and whether the Saudi state itself bears responsibility.
Those questions deserved an investigation built around documents, financial records, communications and competing testimony — not a collection of suspicious coincidences.
The 28 pages were the beginning of the investigation, not its verdict. 60 Minutes made the missing evidence feel like an answer. Twenty-five years later, the country is still trying to establish what that evidence actually means.
References
1. 28 Pages — 60 Minutes — CBS News, April 10, 2016. Original broadcast script, establishing exactly what Kroft and his interviewees claimed.
2. Declassified Version of Part Four of the Joint Congressional Inquiry — US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, July 15, 2016. The original 28 pages, including their express limitations on verification and findings.
3. The 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 7 — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004. Establishes the commission's findings concerning Thumairy, Bayoumi and the disputed restaurant encounter.
4. The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004. Provides the commission's separate conclusions about al-Qaeda funding and the financing of the actual 9/11 plot.
5. Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to September 11 — Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, November 2004; publicly released June 2006. Documents Bayoumi's financial arrangements, his assistance to the hijackers and the FBI's earlier preliminary investigation.
6. FBI Electronic Communication: Albayoumi / GIP Cooptee — FBI, June 14, 2017, reproduced in a US Senate hearing record. Direct documentary evidence confirming Bayoumi's paid relationship with Saudi intelligence and his reporting connection to Prince Bandar.
7. Saudi Officials May Have Deliberately Assisted 9/11 Hijackers, New Evidence Suggests — ProPublica, September 11, 2024. Investigates additional evidence from the families' lawsuit, including previously unavailable videos and records.
8. Memorandum Decision and Order, In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 — US District Court, Southern District of New York, August 28, 2025. The judge's detailed assessment of the evidence supporting jurisdiction over Saudi Arabia, with express limitations concerning the unresolved merits.
9. 25 Years After 9/11, Questions About the FBI's Pursuit of Saudi Suspects Have Only Grown — ProPublica, September 10, 2026. Investigates the handling of seized British evidence, the limited distribution of videotapes and the history of Operation Encore.
10. Appeals Court Hears Arguments in NYC for Lawsuit Accusing Saudi Arabia of Involvement in 9/11 — CBS News New York, October 7, 2026. Reports the latest appellate proceedings and Saudi Arabia's continuing denial of responsibility.