I think there were two threads of the story that got tied together in Vegas:
One thread involved the completely legitimate, normal, on-going interest that governments have in WHO exactly are the baddies trying to buy powerful weapons. You don’t bust them one by one, piecemeal, you wait, uncover a whole, huge right and then bust them all: Undercover ops in which LEO’s knowingly maintain a type of relationship with scumbags is a requirement for success in this.
The other thread involved a Saudi struggle for succession; one power holder was a tepidly religious Saudi reformer who talked about moving away from fundamentalism. The other, a rival, was a more fundamentalist guy who wanted no part of secularism and to stay on the True Path of jihad.
The plan of the jihadi was to knock off the reformer and keep Saudi Arabia as the piggy-bank of jihad.
That’s why they asked for the arms buy to be on the 32nd floor, riiiiight under the Saudi-owned Four Seasons —the newly armed assasins would have only to run up two flights of stairs and be upon their target.
When after offing Paddock it turned out their target wasn’t there they attempted to create chaos as a diversion that would permit them to make good their escape:
It didn’t work.
Paddock was dead and never fired a shot.
Our gummint wants to keep this secret because a fair number of Americans would believe their government INDUCED the massacre, and that would make them look very bad.
I’ve heard that theory before, but how would they have escaped unnoticed? Were MGM security in on getting them out of the Mandalay Bay before the police/SWAT and FBI arrived? Did they scrub the cameras of several Saudis leaving the MB around that time? No guests at MB witnessed the escape?
I think the thing that’s hard to swallow is how to combine components of both the explanations you gave. And other info is the perp searching other concert venues, and that no “spur of the moment massacre” would occur at the last song of a 3 day festival.
Sum Ting Wong but what???