RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — During the 1980s and ’90s, the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king.
Some of those fighters later formed Al Qaeda, which declared war on the United States and later mounted major attacks inside Saudi Arabia as well. In the past decade, according to officials of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Saudi government has become a valuable partner against terrorism, battling Al Qaeda at home and last year joining the American-led coalition against the extremists of the Islamic State.
Yet Saudi Arabia continues to be haunted by what some suspect was a tacit alliance with Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those suspicions burst out in the open again this week with the disclosure of a prison deposition of a former Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, who claimed that more than a dozen prominent Saudi figures were donors to the terror group and that a Saudi diplomat in Washington discussed with him a plot to shoot down Air Force One.
Saudi officials have staunchly denied those claims, noting that Mr. Moussaoui was a convicted terrorist with a history of mental troubles and little to lose by spreading lies about Saudi officials. On Wednesday, experts on the kingdom also expressed strong doubts about Mr. Moussaoui’s claims.
By 1994, when Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and banned from the kingdom, the Qaeda founder was “writing nonstop against the Saudi regime with the idea of toppling it,” said Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “That the Saudis would knowingly support a movement that sought to destroy them makes no sense to me.”
–
Since then, American officials have praised the Saudi government for cracking down on militants inside the kingdom and for acting to stop terrorist financing by Saudi citizens. But the kingdom has continued to support militant groups other than Al Qaeda and armed tribes that it sees as advancing its policies in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. And at home, the kingdom’s traditional religious establishment promotes and enforces a strict interpretation of Islam.
Saudi ways are as alien to Americans as gender equality and sexual freedom in the United States are to many Saudis. Cultural difference have long fueled suspicions on both sides, despite close economic and security ties, said Thomas W. Lippman, author of two books on the kingdom. “At the ideological level, it’s a relationship of mutual revulsion,” he said.
Ben Hubbard reported from Riyadh, and Scott Shane from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2015, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Pre-9/11 Ties Haunt Saudis as More Accusations Surface. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
