The 28 Pages: The Saudi Section of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry That Stayed Classified for Fourteen Years.

What the 28 pages are, in a paragraph.

The 28 pages are Part IV of the final report of the Joint House-Senate Select Committee Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 — the first congressional investigation of the 9/11 intelligence failures, conducted from February through December 2002 under the joint chairmanship of Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) and Representative Porter Goss (R-Florida). The Joint Inquiry's final report was released to the public in December 2002 in redacted form; Part IV, which addressed the question of foreign-government support for the hijackers, was withheld in its entirety on the classification order of President George W. Bush. The decision to classify Part IV was made on the recommendation of the FBI and the CIA, on the stated ground that release would compromise ongoing intelligence relationships and ongoing investigations. The classified pages, internally numbered 395 through 422 of the final report, addressed in particular the activities of Omar al-Bayoumi — a Saudi national living in San Diego who befriended two of the eventual hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, after their January 2000 arrival in the United States, helped them find an apartment, and helped them set up bank accounts — and Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi diplomat and accredited cleric at the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California, who was alleged to have arranged or facilitated al-Bayoumi's contact with the hijackers. The 28 pages were released to the public, in still-redacted form, on July 15, 2016, following sustained bipartisan pressure led by Senator Bob Graham (out of office since January 2005 but continuing the campaign for declassification through his retirement) and a December 2014 House resolution sponsored by Representatives Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) and Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts). The release of the 28 pages did not end the substantive investigation: the FBI's Operation Encore, an investigation into Saudi-government support for the hijackers, continued through the late 2010s and was further opened to public view following the September 3, 2021 Biden Executive Order directing additional declassification, which produced staged document releases in 2021, 2022, and 2024.

The documented record.

The Joint Inquiry and its 2002 report

The Joint Inquiry was established by congressional resolution in Verified February 2002, the first congressional investigation of the 9/11 intelligence failures, predating the better-known 9/11 Commission by approximately eighteen months. The inquiry was conducted by a joint staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, under the chairmanship of Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss. The joint staff was directed by Eleanor Hill, a former Justice Department inspector general. The inquiry held nine public hearings between June and October 2002 and an additional series of closed sessions, and reviewed approximately 500,000 pages of classified documents. The final report was submitted to the President on December 11, 2002 and released to the public in redacted form on December 20, 2002 [1].

Part IV: foreign-government support

Part IV of the final report, titled "Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters," ran to twenty-eight pages and addressed the question of whether the hijackers had received support from a foreign government. The decision to classify Part IV in its entirety was made by President Bush on December 11, 2002, on the joint recommendation of CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller, who argued that release would compromise ongoing intelligence-sharing relationships and ongoing FBI investigations into the matters discussed. The classification was implemented as a redaction of the entirety of pages 395 through 422 of the report — the redacted pages appeared in the 2002 public release as solid black pages with only the page numbers visible [1][2]. Verified

Bob Graham's campaign

Senator Bob Graham, the joint chairman of the Joint Inquiry and one of the few individuals with full knowledge of the 28 pages' contents, was the principal continuing advocate for declassification from the 2002 classification through the 2016 release. Verified Graham's 2004 book Intelligence Matters described the existence and significance of the 28 pages without disclosing their contents; his subsequent public statements, congressional testimony, and op-ed writing through the 2005–2016 period sustained the issue's congressional visibility. Graham's consistent characterization was that the 28 pages established a substantial Saudi-government connection to the hijackers that the executive branch was reluctant to acknowledge. He repeatedly characterized the classification as politically motivated rather than substantively necessary [3]. Graham died in April 2024 at the age of 87, having lived to see the substantial declassification but not the complete resolution of the issue.

The 2014 House resolution

House Resolution 428, introduced by Representatives Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) and Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) in Verified December 2013 and reintroduced as H.Res. 14 in the 114th Congress, called on the President to declassify the 28 pages. The resolution gathered bipartisan support — ultimately 70-plus cosponsors — through 2014 and 2015 and constituted the principal congressional pressure that produced the eventual release. The resolution was not adopted as such but its political effect was substantial: it made the continued classification a sustained domestic political question rather than an inside-the-intelligence-community matter [4].

The July 15, 2016 release

The 28 pages were released to the public, in still-redacted form, on Verified July 15, 2016, in a release coordinated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama. The release was prompted by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees' formal request, which followed the sustained pressure of the Jones-Lynch resolution. The released document retained redactions of approximately 15 percent of its content, principally relating to specific individual names, intelligence sources and methods, and ongoing investigations [5]. The substantive disclosures included:

• Identification of Omar al-Bayoumi as a Saudi national whose contacts with hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego in 2000 had been investigated by the FBI and who was characterized in the document as having "facilitated" the hijackers' establishment in the United States.
• Identification of Fahad al-Thumairy as a Saudi government-accredited cleric at the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City whose alleged role in directing al-Bayoumi was a subject of FBI investigation.
• Discussion of al-Bayoumi's documented receipt of payments from a Saudi government source — the report identifies this as the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority, where al-Bayoumi was nominally employed — in amounts that the FBI had assessed as inconsistent with his actual job duties.
• Reference to the Saudi government's representative in San Diego at the relevant time, Princess Haifa al-Faisal (wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Bandar bin Sultan), whose charitable payments through intermediaries had reportedly reached al-Bayoumi's wife.
• Discussion of the FBI's pre-9/11 awareness of al-Bayoumi as a possible Saudi intelligence operative.

The FBI's Operation Encore

Concurrently with the 2002–2016 classification dispute, the FBI conducted a continuing investigation, codenamed Verified "Operation Encore," into possible Saudi-government support for the hijackers. The Operation Encore investigation was a sub-investigation of the broader PENTTBOM (Pentagon-Twin-Towers Bombing) 9/11 investigation. Operation Encore's existence was publicly disclosed in 2016 in connection with the 28-page release, but its substantive findings remained largely classified until additional disclosures in 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2024 [6][7]. The Operation Encore documents released in Verified 2018, in connection with discovery in civil litigation by 9/11 family-member plaintiffs (the "Ashton" litigation), identified additional alleged Saudi-government connections to the hijackers, including specific Saudi consular employees in Los Angeles. The 2021 and 2022 releases, under the Biden Executive Order, identified the role of Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles, as having directed support to al-Bayoumi.

The 2021 Biden Executive Order

On Verified September 3, 2021, in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and in response to a public letter from approximately 1,800 9/11 family members urging declassification, President Joseph Biden issued Executive Order 14040 directing the Attorney General and other agencies to conduct a declassification review of FBI investigative records related to 9/11 and to release any documents that could be released consistent with national security. The Executive Order produced staged releases of Operation Encore material in September 2021, 2022, and (after further review) 2024 [8]. The substantive effect of these releases has been to confirm and extend the picture of alleged Saudi-government facilitation of the hijackers that the 28 pages had established in 2016.

The 2024 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence review

As of Verified 2024, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was conducting an ongoing review of the remaining classified material related to the 28 pages and Operation Encore, with particular attention to material referenced in but not included in the 2021–2024 declassifications. The HPSCI review was being conducted under the chairmanship of the committee and was the subject of ongoing reporting through 2025. The review had not, as of May 2026, produced additional public disclosures.

The competing positions.

The position of the Saudi government, consistently maintained since 2002, is that no Saudi government official or employee acting in an official capacity provided support to the 9/11 hijackers, that the contacts described in the 28 pages and the Operation Encore disclosures reflected the activities of private individuals, and that the absence of a U.S. government finding to the contrary — including the 2004 9/11 Commission Report's finding that it had found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded al Qaeda" — supports the Saudi position. The Saudi government has supported declassification efforts and characterized the eventual releases as exculpatory. Claimed

The position of the 9/11 family-member plaintiffs in the civil litigation (the consolidated In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 proceedings, S.D.N.Y.) is that the 28 pages and the subsequent Operation Encore disclosures together establish a substantial pattern of Saudi-government facilitation, including through identified Saudi consular employees and identified Saudi-government-paid individuals (al-Bayoumi, al-Thumairy, al-Jarrah), that supports the plaintiffs' civil claims against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA, enacted September 2016). Claimed

The position of the U.S. intelligence community, expressed across multiple administrations, is more cautious: that the available material establishes the involvement of specific Saudi individuals with possible connections to the Saudi government, but does not establish a chain of authorization or direction that would constitute Saudi-government sponsorship of the attacks in the sense those terms are used in formal intelligence assessment. The intelligence community's position has consistently been that the question of Saudi-government sponsorship is, on the available evidence, unresolved rather than answered in either direction. Disputed

The unanswered questions.

The chain of authorization

The central unresolved question is whether the documented activities of al-Bayoumi, al-Thumairy, al-Jarrah, and others were authorized or directed by the Saudi government as a matter of policy — that is, whether they were operating as Saudi intelligence assets under direction — or whether they were Saudi-government-connected individuals acting on their own initiative or under direction of factions within the Saudi state apparatus that were not authorized by the senior leadership. The Operation Encore disclosures through 2024 establish the individuals' Saudi-government connections substantially more clearly than the 28 pages alone did; they do not establish the chain of authorization that would resolve the central question.

The pre-9/11 intelligence picture

The FBI's pre-9/11 assessment of al-Bayoumi as a possible Saudi intelligence operative, referenced in the 28 pages, raises the question of why this assessment was not acted on more aggressively in the period before the attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report addressed pre-attack intelligence failures comprehensively but did not specifically address the al-Bayoumi line of investigation in the depth that the 28 pages enable. Disputed

The Princess Haifa al-Faisal payments

The reference in the 28 pages to charitable payments by Princess Haifa al-Faisal that reportedly reached al-Bayoumi's wife — characterized in the 2016 release as charitable assistance to a Saudi citizen in the U.S. on medical grounds — remains contested as to whether the payments constituted indirect Saudi-government support for the al-Bayoumi-hijacker contacts or were independent charitable activity. The Saudi government and Princess Haifa have consistently characterized the payments as charitable; the 9/11 family plaintiffs have characterized them as suspicious; the available evidence has not definitively resolved the question.

The remaining classified material

The 2016 release of the 28 pages was a redacted release; the 2021–2024 Operation Encore releases were also redacted. Whether the remaining classified material would substantially change the picture established by the publicly released portions, or would principally confirm and detail what has already been disclosed, is the principal subject of the continuing 2024 HPSCI review. Unverified

The relationship to the broader 9/11 picture

The 28 pages address a specific aspect of the 9/11 case — alleged foreign-government support for the hijackers — that intersects with but does not exhaust the broader picture of the attacks. The other questions in the broader 9/11 record — the al-Qaeda planning, the operational tradecraft, the pre-attack intelligence failures across U.S. agencies — are addressed in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report and the broader investigative record [9]. The 28 pages are properly read as a discrete substantive contribution rather than as a master key to the case.

Primary material.

The accessible primary record on the 28 pages and the surrounding investigation is held at:

• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (dni.gov) hosts the official July 2016 release of the 28 pages in redacted form and the subsequent Operation Encore declassifications under the 2021 Executive Order.
• The U.S. National Archives (NARA) holds the complete Joint Inquiry record, including the closed-session record of the investigation.
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi.gov/news/stories) hosts the agency's official release of Operation Encore documents under the 2021 Executive Order.
• The 9/11 Family Steering Committee and related plaintiff organizations have hosted parallel collections of the released documents and litigation materials.
• The Senate Historical Office and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence record office hold the legislative and committee record of the continuing review.

Critical individual documents include: the 2002 Joint Inquiry Final Report; the July 15, 2016 release of the 28 pages; the 2018 Ashton-litigation Operation Encore disclosures; Executive Order 14040 of September 3, 2021; the September 2021, 2022, and 2024 Operation Encore declassification batches; and the 2004 9/11 Commission Report for the broader investigative context.

The sequence.

1. January 15, 2000 Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrive in Los Angeles. Within days, they encounter Omar al-Bayoumi in a restaurant; he subsequently helps them relocate to San Diego.
2. February 2000 Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar settle in San Diego with al-Bayoumi's assistance, including help with apartment lease and bank accounts.
3. September 11, 2001 Attacks. Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar are among the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, which strikes the Pentagon.
4. February 2002 Joint House-Senate Inquiry into 9/11 intelligence failures established.
5. June–October 2002 Joint Inquiry public hearings.
6. December 11, 2002 Joint Inquiry Final Report submitted to the President. Bush classifies Part IV (the 28 pages).
7. December 20, 2002 Joint Inquiry Final Report released publicly in redacted form, with the 28 pages presented as solid black pages.
8. July 2004 9/11 Commission Report released. Addresses the broader picture but does not have access to all 28-page material.
9. 2004 Bob Graham publishes Intelligence Matters, the first detailed public reference to the existence of the 28 pages.
10. December 2013 Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch introduce H.Res. 428 calling for declassification.
11. July 15, 2016 The 28 pages released to the public in redacted form by ODNI.
12. September 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) enacted over presidential veto; enables civil suit against Saudi Arabia.
13. 2018 FBI Operation Encore documents disclosed in civil-litigation discovery, identifying additional Saudi consular figures.
14. September 3, 2021 Biden Executive Order 14040 directs further declassification of FBI 9/11 records.
15. September 2021, 2022, 2024 Operation Encore disclosures released in staged batches; identify Musaed al-Jarrah and additional Saudi-consular contacts.
16. April 2024 Bob Graham dies at 87.
17. 2024–2026 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence continuing review of remaining classified material.

Cases on this archive that connect.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories (File 037) — the broader picture of contested narratives about the September 11 attacks. The 28 pages are the most consequential substantive contribution to the post-2002 9/11 evidentiary record outside the 9/11 Commission Report itself; the conspiracy-theory framings of 9/11 are a separate matter.

The Pentagon Papers (File 023) — the parallel case of a major classified government document whose release after sustained legal and political pressure substantially altered the public record of a national-security matter.

The Snowden Disclosures (File 025) — the parallel modern case of intelligence-community classification's relationship to public knowledge of national-security matters.

The JFK Assassination (File 006) — the broader pattern of multi-decade declassification of records associated with a single national-security event. The 9/11 record is the most current case in the same pattern.

Full bibliography.

1. U.S. Congress, Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. Final Report, December 2002. Released publicly December 20, 2002 in redacted form. Part IV (the 28 pages) released July 15, 2016.
2. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Joint Inquiry Report Pages 395–422 Released to the Public." July 15, 2016. dni.gov.
3. Graham, Bob, with Jeff Nussbaum. Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror. Random House, 2004.
4. House Resolution 428 (113th Congress) and H.Res. 14 (114th Congress), Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch, calling for declassification of the 28 pages. 2013–2015.
5. U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Released text of the 28 pages, July 15, 2016. Available at dni.gov.
6. Federal Bureau of Investigation. PENTTBOM and Operation Encore investigative records, partial release under FOIA and under civil-litigation discovery, 2016–2024.
7. Risen, James, and Tim Golden. "Saudis and Extremism: 'Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters.'" New York Times, August 25, 2016. Substantial reporting on the 28 pages and Operation Encore.
8. Executive Order 14040 of September 3, 2021, "Declassification Reviews of Certain Documents Concerning the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001." Federal Register, September 8, 2021.
9. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission). Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. July 22, 2004. The broader 9/11 investigative record.
10. In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001. Multi-district litigation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The consolidated civil litigation by 9/11 family members against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under JASTA.
11. Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), Public Law 114-222, enacted September 28, 2016.
12. U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Continuing review of declassified and remaining-classified 9/11 records, 2024–2026.
13. Lance, Peter. Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI. HarperCollins, 2006/revised 2009. Substantial coverage of the FBI's pre-9/11 investigative posture, including al-Bayoumi-adjacent matters.
14. U.S. National Archives. Catalog of 9/11-related declassified records, including the Joint Inquiry record and the staged Operation Encore releases.