December 4-10, 2003

pretzel logic

Phil in the Blanks

by Howard Altman

No matter how many times I tell it, the story of the www.saudi-binladin-group.com website verges on Beautiful Mind territory, so I am most appreciative as the man from MI5, who identifies himself, Bond-like, as "Jim. Just Jim," listens intently.

He does not say much, Jim, Just Jim. But his occasional grunt of acknowledgement or muted "yes" tells me that someone in the intelligence community is at least feigning interest in what is either a most unfortunate coincidence or evidence that the bin Laden family -- which publicly disavowed its wayward 17th son -- may have played an active role in the terror attacks of two years ago.

In a nutshell, which is probably an apt description, this is basically what I tell Jim, Just Jim:

The Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), owned by Osama’s family (which uses an alternate spelling of the family name), is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest conglomerates. On Sept. 11, 2000, the company registered saudi-binladin-group.com -- with a preset expiration date of Sept. 11, 2001. The website was created by a man named Philip Lumsden, who ran a Web-design company in Bath, England, called Arq Limited. The company folded a week before I began researching the story back in November 2001. My efforts to reach Lumsden were unsuccessful.

The reason I am calling now, I tell the man from MI5, is that recently, while doing research on another story about SBG, I Googled Lumsden’s name and found that he’s the managing partner of a company called CyberSol.

I tell Jim, Just Jim that CyberSol, according to the company’s website, provides "mobile computing and communications solutions" built to military standards for use in harsh environments.

"Typical users are military, law enforcement and national security agencies …" states the website.

Even more interesting, I tell Jim, Just Jim is that CyberSol uses the services of the Iridium satellites -- a system that was originally funded in no small part by the aforementioned Saudi Binladin Group. (Eventually, Iridium LLC went bankrupt and its assets, including the satellites, were purchased by a group that has no connection to SBG.)

I also mention that CyberSol and Lumsden maintain a connection with SBG -- via a partner company called Liveworks LTD, whose website lists its Middle East contacts as Lumsden and "CyberSol, c/o Saudi Bin Ladin Group."

I suggest to Jim, Just Jim that, given the website expiration date, the fact Lumsden is now working with top-secret data and that he is still connected to the bin Laden family, perhaps MI5 or some other intel agency might want to learn firsthand whether the mysterious Mr. Lumsden can shed light on 9/11.

"I’ll pass it along," he says.

I can almost hear his eyes roll.

Since I first wrote about the SBG website, some have chalked the domain expiry up to happenstance.

Many others, however, are skeptical.

"The bin Ladens have been tight with the Bush family for many years, so the fact that Lumsden and CyberSol are involved in the U.S. military/intelligence complex does not surprise me," says Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency analyst who now covers intel issues for The Village Voice and other publications.

Madsen, like me, thinks that agencies like the FBI and MI5 should, at the very least, pay Lumsden a visit.

"Why isn’t this guy under investigation?" he asks. "People are sitting in Guantanamo with hardly an iota of connection with the bin Ladens, yet this guy is walking around. The thing is, it seems like if you have a few million dollars worth of investments with the bin Ladens, you go free. If some guy might have had a chance encounter with some al-Qaeda guy, you are enemy combatant, sitting in Gitmo or in a jail in the U.S. without any right to see an attorney. This is a topsy-turvy way to fight the war on terror when you go after bit players while people involved in major business ventures seem to go unscathed and not put under any sort of spotlight."

Philip Lumsden, as it turns out, did get his share of the spotlight.

Tuesday morning, the day after I spoke with MI5, I receive a response to an e-mail I sent to him at Cybersol.

I am thrilled to hear from him, considering all I have written about him.

Lumsden tells me he is a longtime friend of the bin Laden family and that he was asked by them to create a website because he had an extensive knowledge of SBG.

"The novelty of the website soon wore off," writes Lumsden. "As a result it was not kept up to date and the domain name eventually expired. Both the U.S. and U.K. authorities have copies of all the paperwork relevant to the expiry of the domain name."

Lumsden states that he was indeed contacted by investigators from both sides of the Great Puddle.

"All I am free to tell you is that I was thanked for my contribution," he writes. "The website included my name. I hosted it on Arq’s server to minimize expense. As a consequence I received many death threats, by e-mail, after 9/11, which although disturbing for someone who lived through the bombing in the ’39-’45 war, it was extremely frightening for Arq’s young team of designers and Web builders."

Lumsden now regrets ever posting the SBG website.

"It was against all the odds that the date of expiry was 9/11/2001," he writes.

So another mystery solved.

Or is it?

Definitely a case for Jim, Just Jim.