When, on Feb. 8, 2013, former FBI agent John Guandolo appeared on the Tom Trento syndicated show, accusing President Obama's CIA Director nominee and White House counter-terrorism director, John Brennan, of being a Saudi intelligence asset and a convert to Islam, EIR counterintelligence researchers launched an investigation to corroborate or disprove the charges. Brennan, it was learned, had not only served as the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia from 1996-1999. He had earlier served at least one tour as an analyst, based out of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, early in his CIA career.
And U.S. intelligence officials who had served with Brennan in the Middle East during his career at CIA confirmed that he had the highest levels of Saudi intelligence contacts of any American spy.
While the EIR investigation has not fully corroborated the Guandolo charges against Brennan, much of the profile of Obama's top White House spook has, in fact, been confirmed. And while Guandolo has been vilified as a Muslim-basher, senior U.S. intelligence sources familiar with his work during a 12-year career with the FBI have given him high marks for doing breakthrough investigative work on the penetration of the Muslim Brotherhood into key U.S. government offices and intelligence organizations.
A 1989 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Guandolo served as a Marine Corps reconnaisance officer, before joining the FBI in approximately 1996. According to the sources, Guandolo headed a special post-9/11 FBI task force investigating the Muslim Brotherhood. He lectured various U.S. government agencies and was one of the lead investigators on a major case involving a Muslim Brotherhood network operating out of the northern Virginia area, with suspected links to several of the 9/11 hijackers. Although Guandolo and other FBI investigators believed they had enough evidence to indict, the ties between the northern Virginia Muslim Brotherhood nest and U.S. intelligence agencies and the George. W. Bush White House ran so deep that a public prosecution would have been almost impossible.
Guandolo left the FBI in 2008, apparently under attack for his revelations about the links between the U.S. government and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to one senior U.S. intelligence source, the FBI was conducting a probe into Muslim Brotherhood links to the 9/11 attacks in tandem with the investigation into Saudi Arabian Monarchy ties.
The sources contacted by EIR not only provided the background on Guandolo. They also confirmed that, while CIA boss in Saudi Arabia, Brennan did attend the Hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. According to one source, there are only two ways Brennan could have attended the Hajj: He could have been, as Guandolo charged, a convert to Islam, or he could have gone as an invited guest of the Saudi Monarchy (Brennan's predecessor at the White House counter-terrorism post, Frances Townsend, President Bush's personal liaison to the Saudi Monarchy, had reportedly begged to attend the Hajj, but was only allowed a helicopter flight over Mecca during the holy pilgrimage). According to the sources, it is very plausible that the Saudis made a hard pitch to recruit Brennan as an asset inside U.S. intelligence — an asset now slated by the President to be the next CIA Director.
One of the sources contacted by EIR also confirmed that it was John Brennan who pressed for President Obama to continue the coverup of the 28-page chapter from the original Congressional 9/11 investigation — the chapter exposing the Saudi Monarchy's role in bankrolling the hijackers. A central figure in that Saudi funding was Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, who was then the Saudi Ambassador in Washington — and is now the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate. During his 2008 campaign, then-candidate Obama had promised to release the classified 28-pages, and he had also met with 9/11 family representatives in the Oval Office during his first weeks as President in Feb. 2009.
