Turki bin Faisal Al Saud

Turki bin Faisal Al Saud (تركي بن فيصل آل سعود; born 15 February 1945) is a Saudi prince and former government official who served as the head of Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency from 1979 to 2001.

He is the chairman of the King Faisal Foundation's Center for Research and Islamic Studies.

Prince Turki was born on 15 February 1945 in Mecca.

He is the seventh child and youngest son of King Faisal and Iffat bint Mohammad Al Thunayan.

His mother was born to a Turkish mother and an Arab father.

He is full-brother of Sara bint Faisal, Mohammed bin Faisal, Latifa bint Faisal, Saud bin Faisal, Abdul Rahman bin Faisal, Bandar bin Faisal, Luluwah bint Faisal and Haifa bint Faisal.

When he was fourteen, his father sent him to Lawrenceville, New Jersey to complete his secondary education at the Lawrenceville School from which he graduated in 1963.

He graduated in the class of 1968 (alongside future U.S. President Bill Clinton) of Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Turki also did further studies at Princeton, Cambridge, and the University of London where he took courses in Islamic law and jurisprudence.

After returning to the Kingdom, Turki was appointed an adviser in the Royal Court in 1973.

In May 1978 Time magazine reported that Prince Turki was the favorite son of Queen Iffat.

Turki bin Faisal received his primary and some secondary education at a school in Taif built by his parents.

Prince Turki began his political career as deputy to his uncle, Kamal Adham, and then, his successor as the head of Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah (General Intelligence Directorate), a position he held for 23 years—from 1979 until just 10 days before the September 11 attacks in 2001.

He took part in organizing a military operation to remove the hostage-taking terrorists from Masjid al-Haram (the Sacred Mosque) in Mecca during the Grand Mosque Seizure in November 1979.

Turki last met with Osama bin Laden in early 1990 when Osama bin Laden was interested in aiding against the South Yemen communists.

His intelligence agency kept careful track of bin Laden from the beginning of his rise.

Prince Turki maintains that he had no contact with bin Laden since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.

In 1993, Turki helped mediate between warring factions in Afghanistan.

After King Fahd's stroke in 1995, Prince Turki had a minor disagreement with Prince Abdullah who did not want to be briefed by him.

Saudi intelligence joined Pakistan's intelligence service and the CIA in funding the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

In early 1996, Sudan offered to extradite bin Laden to Saudi Arabia.

Clinton called on Turki to bring bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia for a quick execution.

Saudi Arabia denied the request and Osama left Sudan for Afghanistan.

A continued connection to bin Laden was falsely claimed by Paris Match magazine.

He claims to have secretly negotiated with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in 1998 in an attempt to have bin Laden extradited to Saudi Arabia, but the negotiations were unsuccessful.

From 1979 to 2001, Prince Turki was the director general of Al Mukhabarat Al 'Ammah, Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, resigning the position on 1 September 2001, ten days before the September 11 attacks in which 14 Saudi nationals hijacked commercial American airliners.

Prince Turki subsequently served as ambassador to the Court of St. James's and the United States.

Turki claimed that in the months before the September 11 attacks, his intelligence agency knew that something alarming was being planned: “In the summer of 2001, I took one of the warnings about something spectacular about to happen to the Americans, British, French, and Arabs.

We didn’t know where, but we knew that something was being brewed.”

Prince Turki's resignation was unexpected since his term had been extended on 24 May 2001 for another four years.

He was replaced by Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz in the post who had "no background in intelligence whatsoever."

The New York Times later reports: "The timing of Turki’s removal—August 31—and his Taliban connection raise the question: Did the Saudi regime know that bin Laden was planning his attack against the US?"

In a November 2001 interview, Turki expressed support for the US operation in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In 2002, Prince Turki was named in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by the families of 11 September victims, alleging that he and other Saudi princes, banks, and charities may have funded the terrorists involved in the attack.

His involvement was also strongly implied in the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 911.

A reporter for the Baltimore Chronicle claimed he was flown out of the United States shortly after the terrorist attacks, but the claim disappeared from later versions of the article.

Prince Turki described Fahrenheit 911 as "grossly unfair" to Saudis.

In December 2004, Turki accepted substantial libel damages and an apology from Paris Match over claims he himself was linked to the 11 September attacks.

In 2005, a US federal judge ruled that Saudi officials including Turki were immune from the lawsuit.

Turki has severely criticized al-Qaeda, calling it an "evil cult."