Crime of the century

"We do know that our phones have been tapped," Motley drawls when asked about the security measures. "We have to assume that everything we do in the office is going to end up in the hands of the enemy. But at Kiawah," he adds, only half-jokingly, "the only way they can get me is to come by sea."

Because of its size, complexity and potential for igniting international political explosions, this case is already creating drama. It has been filed on behalf of 4,039 survivors of victims and families, including more than 60 families of the 67 Britons who perished in the twin towers and Pentagon attacks. It is named alphabetically after the first plaintiff, Thomas Burnett Sr, whose son was one of those who fought the hijackers of United Airlines flight 83 in the final minutes of its flight over rural Pennsylvania.The plaintiffs call themselves "9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism", and theirs is the largest in a flotilla of 9/11-related civil complaints now anchored together in front of a federal judge in New York.

This particular claim charges some of the pillars of Saudi Arabia's establishment with providing the money and material support that made the 9/11 attacks possible. And it is well on the way to becoming the single biggest civil action in history. "Terrorists like Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network do not exist in a vacuum," the claim asserts. "They cannot plan, train and act on a massive scale without significant financial power, co-ordination and backing. Defendants herein, some of whom act in the shadows, are ultimately responsible for the damages caused by the actions of their terrorist agents and clients."

Some lawyers and journalists call the families' case quixotic. But Motley has been compared to Don Quixote before and, until now, he has mostly had the last laugh. In a career that has transformed this son of a North Charleston petrol-station owner into an extraordinarily wealthy man, he tilted first at America's asbestos industry and then at its cigarette manufacturers. Other lawyers said he was crazy to gamble millions of his firm's hours and resources on what looked like lost causes.

But in the end, Motley won, forcing asbestos companies to settle for billions. And he secured a record-breaking $246 billion settlement in 1998 from cigarette companies on behalf of several states who argued that they had been forced to pick up the medical bill for tobacco addiction. Still, even Motley admits that the 9/11 suit makes all his earlier battles look like child's play.

"This is the most intellectually and socially challenging case I've ever worked on," he says. It may also be the most personally wrenching. The 9/11 attacks took place when Motley was emotionally vulnerable. His 26-year-old son had died the year before and his third marriage had collapsed. He's on his own out there at Kiawah, and friends say he is investing as much emotion as he is money in the case.

And that's a lot. In the 11/2 years since the suit was filed, Motley and his firm, Motley Rice, have already spent more on their own private investigation of radical Islamist financing than the $15m budgeted by the US Congress for the official 9/11 commission. They continue to spend at the rate of about $500,000 a month, excluding lawyers' salaries. If the case goes forward — and it is a big "if" — it promises to expose sensitive information that could damage Saudi Arabia's already tenuous relationship with the United States and embarrass President George W Bush and top officials in his administration, partly because the depth and longevity of Washington's links to the House of Saud could be an unpleasant surprise to the public in both countries, and partly because the Bush administration fears that the suit could further destabilise a crucial Middle Eastern ally. Britain and other US allies could find their trading relations with the oil-rich kingdom poisoned in the case of a judgment that ordered them to seize Saudi assets for a damages payout. In opening this Pandora's box, critics say Motley threatens to finish off Osama Bin Laden's work and to disrupt the supply of cheap Gulf oil on which the world economy depends.

Motley's case has outraged public opinion in the Arab kingdom, where the House of Saud flatly denies its allegations. When the suit was filed in August 2002, the influential daily al-Riyadh thundered: "If America wants to open up the issue of compensation for those who died in the two towers, it must agree to the establishment of an international court that will examine [its own] war crimes, plundering, coups, what American intelligence did with drug barons, the policy of abductions and murder, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the claims still pending regarding the black slave trade, and the deliberate annihilation of the Indians — and apply this to all countries, without statute of limitations so that we feel we live on one planet that functions according to the same moral principle."The dollar immediately dipped against the euro after the Financial Times reported that Saudis had moved $200 billion out of the US in reaction to the suit. (US Treasury figures suggest that the Saudis actually moved far less, but the damage to the dollar was done.)

The defendants, who include a virtual who's who of fantastically rich Arabs, are sparing no expense to fight back against what they say is basically an anti-Muslim witch-hunt. They have secured a defence lineup of Washington's top law firms, on retainers that reportedly start as high as $5m. Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi minister of defence hired Baker Botts, the Houston-based law firm whose partners include the former secretary of state and Bush family intimate James A Baker as well as the outgoing US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan. In November, Prince Sultan and Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain and former minister of intelligence, scored a victory when a US District Court judge dismissed the 9/11 suit against them, on the grounds that under international and US law the court lacked jurisdiction. Last August the same judge threw out about half of the charges against five other Saudi defendants for lack of evidence. Since then, the case has been removed to New York and consolidated along with 26 other 9/11 civil suits before a new judge.

Oral arguments are scheduled to begin this month, but the house of Saud gained another advantage in July. The official 9/11 commission reported that although Al-Qaeda had raised most of its money in the Gulf and particularly Saudi Arabia, they found "no evidence that any foreign government — or foreign government official — supplied any funding" for the 9/11 plot. The commissioners added that they had been unable to determine the source of the $400,000 to $500,000 used to fund the attacks, and suggested that there was no point in trying to find out.

Motley dismisses the commission's investigation as hopelessly superficial. "They had too little time, too little money and too broad a mandate to adequately investigate the financing of Al-Qaeda. The full story is not out yet. We're still in the process of finding it." He is known as a pitbull litigator who likes nothing better than to humiliate his corporate opponents before a jury. He wanted so badly to take before a jury the monster tobacco case he had been preparing for years that his partners have said they had to negotiate the famous 1998 out-of-court tobacco settlement behind his back. After the settlement netted his company more than $2 billion, corporate America shivered in fear as the press speculated about whom he might go after next.

But a foray against the paint industry backfired. Critics accused Motley's firm of colluding with Democratic politicians to squeeze money out of a dying sector. Then came September 11, 2001. Now Motley and his firm are betting their tobacco winnings to go after foreign
targets whose existence they admit they'd never even suspected five years ago: the alleged financiers of terrorism.

To establish and run a sort of mini intelligence agency based in Switzerland, Motley has hired Jean-Charles Brisard, the French private investigator and co-author of the book Forbidden Truth: US — Taliban Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden. Brisard and the book's co-author have faced libel action in several countries, including England, Belgium and Switzerland.

The book has been banned in Switzerland and has yet to be published in this country for legal reasons, but American critics have ridiculed it for theorising that the Bush administration may have provoked the 9/11 attacks with its oil diplomacy. They also have accused Brisard himself of exaggerating his counter-terrorism credentials. That hasn't stopped him and the rest of Motley's team from assembling what they contend is a mountain of evidence against Al-Qaeda's alleged funders.

At the Motley Rice building on the Charles river, computer-data processors who jostle for space with translators of Arabic, Farsi and Urdu are busy converting the 2m documents the firm's investigators have already collected into digital format. They use a powerful computer program called Analyst's Notebook to scan the digitised documents for hidden connections and links to suspected terrorist activity.

Reportedly, the US government is using the same program for the same purpose. Unlike the government, Motley says he plans to share what he finds with the public. "We believe that sunshine is the best disinfectant," he said, leaning back behind a glossy oak desk in his vast office overlooking the river. Among mementos of his successes that he keeps there are an oil painting of his 156ft yacht, the Themis, and a framed copy of the $15,220,250,000 cheque that he helped force tobacco firms write out to the state of Texas.

In Britain, perhaps the most similar case to this one is the civil action the families of the victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing have brought against five men they allege to be behind the car-bomb attack in which 29 people died, including a woman pregnant with twins. Jason McCue, the solicitor representing the Omagh families, said they began searching for other avenues of justice after police were unable to gather enough evidence to mount a criminal case. In 2001 the families issued a writ seeking £10m in civil damages. The writ was the first of its kind in this country, and initially it did not endear McCue to the government. "Those who get involved in traditional areas of government become hate figure No 1," he said.

Diplomats accused him of interfering with the peace process in Northern Ireland. But the families were able to reverse that perception through a skilful media campaign. The government has now promised to contribute £800,000 towards their legal costs. "The big thing to get across in these cases is that it's a way to attack the culture of terrorism," McCue says. "This gives the victims a chance to take the war on terror to the battlegrounds of finance and public relations — areas where our governments have been failing miserably."

Like their Omagh counterparts, the 9/11 families have been spurred on by the collapse of criminal prosecutions against Al-Qaeda suspects in Germany, Italy, Indonesia and the US itself. In the Omagh cases, the problem was that witnesses were afraid to testify. In the 9/11 cases, the biggest obstacle has been the Bush administration's refusal to let witnesses testify. In March, a German court released Mounir al-Motassadeq, the only man convicted of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, after the Bush administration declined to let captured suspects that they were holding, testify on grounds of national security. Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted earlier this year for the same reason. Al-Motassadeq was being retried at the time of going to press, after a last-minute American promise of some access. The US prosecution of the alleged 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui has also stumbled because the administration would not co-operate, as have criminal cases against alleged Al-Qaeda supporters in Italy and Indonesia.

"At this point, not one single person has been held accountable in court for the death of my son and 3,000 other people," said Matthew Selitto, a retired New Jersey teacher whose son died in the World Trade Center. "When we ask why, we get two words: national security. And that's the end of the discussion. That's not good enough for me."

Seeking justice, the 9/11 families turned to Motley and another fabled American lawyer, Allan Gerson. Unlike the Omagh families, they did not have to worry about their legal costs. With few caps on US civil-injury awards, American trial lawyers can — and do — earn up to 30% of potentially unlimited damage awards, giving them an incentive to invest their own time and money in tort cases, as they're known. And since the US has no "loser pays" rule, the families and their lawyers don't run the risk of having to pay an opponent's legal fees. Still, even in the US, only a handful of trial attorneys have the means to pay for a worldwide investigation of terrorism. Motley is one of them.

Motley's legal claim to fame is to have virtually invented so-called "mass tort litigation", in which thousands of claims against a group of defendants are bundled into a single high-stakes case. Motley came up with this strategy as he travelled across the south, representing ailing asbestos workers and smokers, in the 1980s. Defence attorneys say his innovation amounts to a form of blackmail in which potential damages are so high that targets dare not risk a verdict, no matter what the facts of the case. The fight over mass tort litigation has become an entrenched feature of American party politics, with the Republican party and its corporate backers listing tort reform as one of their top priorities, while trial attorneys like Motley and his friend the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, have become some of the Democrats' main funders.

Motley's co-counsel in the 9/11 case, Allan Gerson, is a neo-conservative Republican who has made his own singular contribution to tort law. He crafted the legal strategy that, along with sanctions, eventually forced Libya to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of those killed in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, he pushed the US Congress to pass legislation allowing the victims of terrorism to sue anyone who supports terrorism, even overseas. In the 9/11 case, he and Motley have combined their two specialities and political networks into a remarkable piece of fighting equipment. "Until this suit is finished," Gerson predicts, "the Saudis will never have healthy relations with the US."

Evidently the US government fears he may be right. In the winter of 2002 there were hints that the Bush administration was thinking about asking the courts to dismiss the case, on the grounds that it threatened national security and diplomatic relations. With the administration anxiously seeking Saudi support for its proposed invasion of Iraq, Bush aides told reporters privately in November of that year that "this is not the time to jump up and down about Saudi Arabia". But officials at the US Treasury and Justice departments disagreed, as did some members of Congress. And the September 11 families took out ads in newspapers, held vigils and generally put up such sustained opposition that Bush's men were forced to retreat.

Can Motley spin the hearsay of intelligence reports into courtroom evidence? The burden of proof is not as great in civil as in criminal cases, but there is still reason to doubt that he will fare any better than the many prosecutors who have gone up against Al-Qaeda since 9/11. The Bush administration continues to block his requests, for example, to be allowed to question the FBI translator who says she has seen documents showing that Americans and others have been involved in laundering Al-Qaeda money, or to subpoena the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other captives.

Nor has the administration shared any of the hard evidence it claims to have about the assistance that individual Saudis and others are alleged to have provided to Al-Qaeda. In Britain, the publications hauled into court to justify naming prominent Saudis accused of supporting terrorism have so far failed to do so, and the effort has cost them dearly. Africa Confidential, a private newsletter, spent over £300,000 and six years defending an article reporting that one of the suspects in a 1995 assassination attempt against the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had claimed to work for the now-defunct Muwafaq charity. In 2001 the newsletter was forced to apologise to the Saudi trustees of the charity.

Defence attorneys contend that Motley's scattershot approach reflects his and his staff's ignorance about the Middle East and Islam. The political trends and pathologies that led to Al-Qaeda's formation go far beyond the sinister conspiracy outlined in Motley's complaint, they say. Motley admits he has no prior international legal experience, has never been to the region, and sometimes gets confused by the Arab names and aliases of the hundreds of defendants in the case. Even Gerson, an international lawyer and former diplomat, has said that he had never given any thought before 9/11 as to who was behind Bin Laden, or to the nature and structure of Al-Qaeda.

When one of the families asked him to sue, he said his first question was: "Who's the enemy?" The complaint has been amended twice, but it still includes some allegations that British courts have found to be unsupportable or actually in error.

The defendants' attorneys also point out that nearly all the defendants are Muslim or Arab, although plenty of non-Muslim states, banks and individuals have done business with Islamist radicals over the years. "Why should my client be in the dock for [supposedly] giving Osama Bin Laden money in the 1980s when the US government did the same thing?" a lawyer representing a group of American Muslim defendants asked privately. Motley says he may well add more defendants, non-Muslim and Muslim, as the case unfolds. "Be patient," he says. "As our investigation unfolds, we will continue to add to the list."

Jason McCue says perhaps the most important benefit of cases like this is to warn anyone thinking of supporting terrorism that they could get locked into a hugely expensive class action. But Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who has testified before Congress about terrorism financing, cautions that Motley's case could spawn a thousand new conspiracy theories as easily as it could cast light on new facts. "Investigations can obscure the truth as well as clarify it," he pointed out. He brought up the example of Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney whose investigation of an alleged plot to assassinate President John F Kennedy emboldened conspiracy theorists around the world (including the director Oliver Stone, who made a Hollywood movie about it) even as experts debunked it.

Motley Rice and the 17 other plaintiffs' firms in the case stand to receive 22% of a settlement or 30% of any damages award, if the case he is bringing is successful. But friends vehemently deny that money is Motley's motive. Pointing out that he is already extremely rich, they maintain he is driven by the righteous satisfaction of doing battle on behalf of the world's most famous victims. "He just has an incredible desire and need to go after whoever he thinks are the bad guys," says Mark Curriden, a lawyer and journalist who got to know Motley while covering the tobacco wars. Curriden says that Motley identifies so passionately with his clients that he almost seems to undergo a process of transference with each big case. Like a method actor, he draws on the experiences of his own life to share his clients' pain and anger, and to convey it to a jury. During the tobacco wars, he wept with the families of dead smokers about his mother, a chain-smoker who died of emphysema. Now, with the 9/11 families, he has shared his anguish over his son, who died four years ago after an operation to relieve epileptic seizures.

Many of the families see him as their last hope of uncovering who might have been behind the 9/11 plot now that the official commission has finished its work. "Ron and his workers are the only people I think that truly care about finding out the truth," said Joan Molinari tearfully. Her son Carl died in the twin towers. "He's getting information that no one else has and he's spending his own money to do it. Do I expect it to be resolved in my lifetime? No, I do not, and maybe not in Ron's... But he's not a quitter and he's not going to let us down."

Asked why he continues to pursue the case, Motley chooses his words with care. He says he considers it a civic obligation, and that, like his clients, he wants to dry up the flow of money that nourishes terrorism. But one senses that alongside outrage, the deepest drive of all may be his own insatiable desire to know what really happened. "Like any American, I was horrified by the events of September 11 and I wanted to know, 'Who did this?'" he said. "Now that I'm in a position to find out, by God, I'm going to find out... We're going to spend whatever it takes to expose the people who funded Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda."