State Secrets.(Al Haramain Islamic Foundation)(Organization overview)

One Friday afternoon in August, 2004, a Washington, D.C., attorney named Lynne Bernabei received a package from the Department of the Treasury. The government was investigating one of her clients, the American branch of a Saudi charity called the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which had been active in fifty countries. Al Haramain had come under scrutiny, as had many other Islamic charities, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Treasury Department investigators believed that Al Haramain's American branch, which was based in Oregon, had connections to Al Qaeda. In response to a request from Bernabei for evidence against her client, the government had turned over two sets of documents, primarily media reports that referred to other branches of Al Haramain. None of the materials demonstrated a direct connection between the Oregon branch and Al Qaeda.

Bernabei asked for any classified evidence the government might have, arguing that it was impossible to rebut evidence that she couldn't see. When a third batch of evidence arrived, that August afternoon, the cover letter noted that the enclosed materials were "unclassified," so Bernabei didn't give much thought to the last item, a four-page document stamped "Top Secret." "My impression was that it might have been something that was declassified," she told me recently.

Bernabei photocopied the materials and forwarded them to the half-dozen clients and attorneys associated with the case. Several weeks later, the Treasury Department concluded its investigation, and declared the Oregon branch of Al Haramain a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, citing "direct links" with Osama bin Laden.

Soon afterward, two F.B.I. agents visited Bernabei's office and informed her that a classified document had accidentally been turned over to her. Bernabei told them that she had received only "unclassified" information, but she agreed to retrieve the document from her files. According to Bernabei, one of the agents suggested that as she looked for the document she should try not to think about what it contained. In the following weeks, F.B.I. agents tracked down the copies that she had distributed. One lawyer for Al Haramain had an electronic copy. The F.B.I. asked to purge it from his computers.

Bernabei said that she and her associates did not appreciate the significance of the document, and the government's efforts to recover it, until December, 2005, when the New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration had authorized the National Security Agency to employ wiretaps inside the United States without first getting a warrant. The document that the Treasury Department had turned over to Bernabei appears to have been a summary of intercepted telephone conversations between two of Al Haramain's American lawyers, in Washington, and one of the charity's officers, in Saudi Arabia. The government had evidently passed along proof of surveillance to the targets of that surveillance, and supplied the Oregon branch of Al Haramain--a suspected terrorist organization--with ammunition to challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless-wiretapping program.

Well before September 11th, U.S. intelligence agencies had suspicions about the connections between Islamic charities and terrorism. Zakat, or charitable tithing, is one of the five pillars of Islam, a duty for observant Muslims, and, by some estimates, Saudi charities raise four billion dollars a year. They establish mosques and community centers, distribute religious literature, and dispatch clerics to spread Wahhabism, the severe strain of fundamentalist Islam that is the official religion of the kingdom. "This is an element of Saudi foreign policy," Lee Wolosky, a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton and Bush Administrations, told me. "It's very well coordinated. It happens at the highest levels of the Saudi state." In 2004, David Aufhauser, who as the Treasury Department's general counsel oversaw its counterterrorism efforts after September 11th, estimated that in recent decades the kingdom had spent "north of seventy-five billion dollars" on Islamic evangelism.

Al Haramain was established, with help from the Saudi royal family, in 1991. Its headquarters were in Riyadh, with offices in foreign countries. Within a few years, the charity was suspected by the C.I.A. of involvement in terrorism. In 1996, a C.I.A. report suggested that a third of Islamic N.G.O.s "support terrorist groups or employ individuals who are suspected of having terrorist connections"; it named Al Haramain as an example. In 1997, a C.I.A. informant in Nairobi said that the local branch of Al Haramain planned to blow up the U.S. Embassy. According to the Times, a C.I.A. inquiry turned up no evidence of a plot, but after the bombings of the American Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the following year, Kenyan authorities ordered Al Haramain from the country. In a trial on the bombings in New York in 2001, prosecutors introduced a collection of business cards that had been seized from the Nairobi home of Wadih el-Hage, an Al Qaeda operative who was eventually convicted for his role. One belonged to Mansour al-Kadi, an Al Haramain official in Riyadh, who was the titular vice-president of the Oregon branch (though he never played an active role there, and no further connection was made between the charity and the bombings).