What the US Knew about Mohammed Atta before 9/11

A little less is known about Mohammed Atta=s activities than about those of Ali Mohamed, but it is clear that even without information from Able Danger, the government had enough information to keep tabs on him. Moreover, it is clear that the FBI had knowledge of the movements of Atta and two others in Venice, Florida before 9-11. In addition, two Al Qaeda terrorists were tailed in San Diego by the FBI. They resided there with a known FBI asset. The bureau forbade agent Stephen Butler from telling t he 911 Commission of his frustration that his superiors would do nothing about these two subjects, Hazmi and Midhar.

For almost four years, while he was in Germany, Atta was employed by a foundation run by the German and US governments -- Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. He was an instructor in an exchange program , and did some work for it in Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo. The US part of the program was overseen by the State Department but ranking private citizens such as David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were also involved. He also attended the Technical University at Hamburg, and German federal police ( BKA) investigated him for minor drug crimes.


According to a September 24, 2001 article in the German intelligence magazine Focus, German security people were watching and listening to the Hamburg cell in 1998 and 1999, and it is not unreasonable to assume their information was shared with the CIA. In 1999, the CIA attempted to recruit one member of that cell, Mamoun Darhazanli. There is evidence that he visited the Philippines in 1999, but there is no clear evidence that the Germans knew this. The American agency started following Atta in January of 2000 and found that he was buying dangerous chemicals in Frankfurt. On May 18, 2000, he obtained a visa in Berlin and arrived in New Jersey on June 3, 2000. There is some evidence that he had been in the US before, and there is clear evidence that he and Marwan Alshehhi visited the Philippines in 1999. Several months later, while in Florida, he received $100,000 from General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of the Pakistani intelligence service. This man was in Washington on September 10, 2001. In all, they probably received $325,000 from Pakistani intelligence. About $175,000 more came from unknown sources. Atta was attending a flight school at Huffman Avaiation in Venice, but he had previously attend two others. He and Marwan each paid $28,000 for instruction, but there were many places where instruction would cost a great deal less . He was a licensed pilot already and was given the privileges of an instructor. He may have even gone on some drug runs for them. It was known that he had business dealings with men who flew in from Germany to see him. It is also known that twelve other hijackers had lived somewhere near those two flight schools at one time or other.

The DEA confiscated and auctioned a private jet owned by one of the owners of the school. The agency found 43 pounds of heroin. No action was ever taken against the owner Wally Hilliard, a 70 year old born-again retired Midwesterner whose firm=s motto was AFight Sin, Hate Communism, and Back the Pack.@ The DEA did not arrest the pilot even though he had refused to give them his cell phone. He obtained the jet from the same people who provided Barry Seal with jets when he was working for the CIA, bringing drugs into Mena, Arkansas.( Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9/11 Commission had been Seal's lawyer.) The same jet had made 39 weekly milk runs to Venezuela before the DEA acted. The school=s co-owner was Rudi Dekkers, a native of Holland who owed his government $3,000,000. A former Huffman executive said it was clear their drug trade had government protection. Hiliard also operated an air carrier which was used and endorsed by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. There was a second flight school at that airport owned by another native of Holland, Arne Kruithof. The two Hollanders bought flight schools within months of one another. Other airlines operated out of that airport, including one known CIA company, Caribe Air, and the little known , Bratannia Aviation which was to obtain a multi-million dollar contract to maintain the Lynchburg, Va. Airport. Pilots for the3 various firms moonlighted by doing missionary flights at night for religions groups like Pat Robertson=s Operation Hope..

Dekkers claimed he did not know her, but they both used Pascal Schreier, a German, to recruit Arab students. From the time Dekkers came to Venice in 1999 Arab students were frequenting ths school in significant numbers. Dekkers and Hilliard had been in business together before, paid too much for the flight school, and had apparently lost millions in their ventures. Money was not their problem. They had an odd habit of conducting private conversations inside a plane that was in a building.

Dekkers said Atta was a terrible person, an incompetent pilot who left school December 20, 2000 and did not return.. Others claim Atta was there in 2001 and that he and the operator were friendly. In August, two of the other hijackers were with Atta, and Atta=s attorney father visited from Egypt. The three younger men were said to hire a Yellow Cab in the evenings which was driven by a retired Navy Seal, who left soon after they left Venice. Another driver reported that the two were on very friendly terms and that they shared a cab to a Sarasota night spot in August, 2001. Atta was apparently a hard drinker, and he sometimes partied with pilots most probably tied to CIA operations. . On September 8, 2001 he was two companions in a Ft. Lauderdale bar named Shuckums, where he got wasted and called out AF**k God.@Atta was also known to gamble and mix with ladies of the night, but he was not the only terrorist who was not a strict Muslim.


Four terrorists lived above a strip club called ALance in Wayne, New Jersey. They were Lebanese pilot Ziad Jarrah and three Saudi musclemen, Ahmed al-Haznawi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Saeed al-Ghamdi Probably because the were portrayed as religious fanatics, the FBI confiscated the security tapes showing them in the club. Videotapes of a nearb y video store patronized b y the hijackers and the Mossad agents tailing them were also seized, and later telephone numbers of the store patrons disappeared in a strange robbery.

The FBI showed up at Shuckums' bar eight hours after his plane hit the World Trade Center. For some reason, the FBI asked all kinds of questions about him in places other than Venice, where he spent much of his time. The FBI also asked a few questions in Venice, and agent talked to a flight school executive four hours after the planes struck. However, the bulk of the investigation there was left to the state Department of Law Enforcement.


Around 2 AM on September 12, according to Venice policemen, the flight school records were spirited away in two Ryder trucks that went to the Sarasota Airport, where Jeb Bush and a Florida Air National Guard C-130 were waiting. .

Mohammed el-Amir Atta insists his son was not involved in 9/11. Unable to accept what appears to have happened,has said that his son telephoned him on September 12, 2001. Almost a year later, he was sticking to his story, saying his son was in hiding.



Following the lead of the FBI, the 9-11 commission did not discuss the schools. The FBI has repeatedly said that Atta left the school in late 2000. At the Moussaoui trial, clear evidence was produced that Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were still there and flying in February, 2001 and that the FBI knew all about it. Moreover, they violated airpark rules by taking off at night and were observed by a watchman and the police, who conducted the flight school. The FBI subsequently interviewed a Huffman administrator about the incident. Yet, another administrator told a Congressional panel under oath that the school had no knowledge of the two men after December 24, 2000.The Knight Rider papers, the Washington Post, and Newsweek reported a week after 9-11 that five of the hijackers had been trained at US military facilities at one time or another. This did not involve Atta=s brief employment much earlier in Hamburg, before he experienced a religious conversion in Egypt. It was said that Atta was at the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Abdulaziz Alomari was at the Areospace Medical School in Texas.The Sarasota Herald-Times discovered that Atta lived for more than two months at the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice in March and April of 2001 with a part-time stripper and lingerie model. She reported that the FBI urged her to keep quiet. Florida records show that Atta became a business partner of chief Morrocan military attache Colonel Ahmed Arara and another man in business venture of some sort. The attache could have been related to highjacker Mohammed Araras.
Soon after 9-11, FBI agents were in Venice asking questions that made it clear they knew about Atta=s movements there. The nature mof their questioning activities strongly suggests they were very much aware of Atta=s presence there before 9-11. They questioned another cabbie about their nocturnal rides with the other driver. They seized a pharmacy=s security tape for the day Atta and his father were there and excised that part of the tape. It develops in an odd coincidence that the woman who helped one of the hijackers find an apartment was the wife of Michael Irish, the senior National Enquirer editor who received an anthrax letter. Irish also used that aifield.

There were rumors that the flight schools had a CIA connection, and that their records were removed on September 12, 2001. . The limited action taken after the biggest drug seizure in central Florida history led to speculation about some kind of a protected drug trade. For years there have been rumors about CIA and DIA drug trading; and those who have written about this have had their careers ruined. There will probably never be enough evidence to prove why the Pentagon did not want to move against Atta and now claims it knew nothing about him. One employee said Atta and others moved on to a school in Pompano Beach to learn to fly big jets via simulator. He added that he did not think this approach could be successful.Fired FBI translator Sibel Edmunds was asked if she came across evidence that there was any evidence of a connection between drug trading and 9-11. She said,
"The 9/11 terror plot intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on.@ As she came to understand how tight federal gag order placed upon her was, she later answered this question with a "nondenial-denial." Don=t look for solid answers anytime soon. Daniel Hopsiocker, who has long investigated the Venice flight school attended by Atta, ties the seized a hereoin shipment found in the plane of one of the co-owners of the school. Puzzling over why the plane was seized but the politically connected owner was never touched, he concluded that someone with great influence in DC was buying drugs from Osama bin Laden. We know Al Qaeda sells drugs, but that connection is just a guess. It has also been suggested that he had been involved in a protected heroin smuggling operation and that this accounts for the Pentagon=s reluctance to pursue him earlier. Given the history of that airport, it is far more likely that the CIA was moving drugs through it. in 9-11


Quite a bit has been written about 120 Israeli Aart students who were in the United States before 9/11. Very frequently they stayed in close proximity to where Al Qaeda agents were staying. It is very likely that they were keeping the terrorists under surveillance. They worked hard to penetrate some federal agencies, particularly the DEA but their reasons for doing this are unclear. The fact that they were scouting federal facilities in places other than Washington and New York City might suggest they either did not know what the targets were or expected there to be more targets. Some of the agents were deported before 9/11 and several were detained for several months after that event. About 60 Israelis were picked up for questioning. Some speculate that the Israeli=s were working with Al Qaeda, but there is little evidence to sustain that notion. What they were doing was unclear.

There was altogether too much information about Atta and his movements easily available to federal intelligence agencies prior to 9/11. One could also assume that the Germans filled in American intelligence on what they knew. The CIA and Mossad have historically close ties, and it is possible that Langley knew most of what the Israeli painters knew. It would be possible to reach a definite conclusion if we knew for certain that the aviation schools at Venice still had strong CIA ties in 2000 and 2001. We lack that information, so the reader must draw her own conclusions.

Victor Bout:and the Russian Mafia: America’s Business Associates

Some CIA officials have voiced concern about American involvement with illegal arms dealer Victor Bout,and Senator Russell Feingold has expressed deep frustration over continued ties to Bout. It took undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz eight months to answer Feingold’s May 18, 2004 questions about dealings with Bout. It is unclear whether the US really needs his services in Iraq. In the past the CIA has been a major mover of licit and illicit arms and has often worked with private contractors in doing this. Major political figures have been raked off large commissions from these deals. However, there is growing evidence of ties Bout and the Russian Mafia on the part of the US government people close to it in other parts of the world. It may relate to the scramble of western banks to get their share of the vast wealth that has been pillaged from the former Soviet Union. One important function of the intelligence community is assisting American business. The current black economy is so large that these banks believe they must compete for their share of the money laundering business by dealing with intelligence agencies and organized crime. .It was also important to national security that as much of the Russian loot as possible be in banks that supported the dollar rather than the euro. The Russian mob , known also for extortion and the trade, accommodated western bankers with prostitutes, and later produced embarrassing video tapes . The Russian mob has been good enough to deposit 80% of its drug profits in western banks and it has used these deposits to play on the greed of Western capitalists. In 1997-1998, Mobil Oil entered a deal with Atlas Oil, a Russian mob firm, for oil and advanced $45,000,000 before realizing it had been taken. It received not one barrel for its investment. Seymour Hersh covered the scam in a July 9, 2001 article, but Mobil induced other journalists to make the story go away. One internal memo advised doing nothing as Russian mobsters were far more ruthless than members of American organized crime.

Bout has worked with some American security consulting firms since 1994 and was instrumental in placing the Russian mafia in working relationships with some of them. In the Caucuses, , which has had a history of involvement in the drug traffic, has been working with Far West , Ltd. He added that Far West indirectly cooperates with the US government, and these ties to Far West, Ltd in recent years seem to have the apparent approval of the CIA.

Far West is a major Russian mafia operation that provides security consulting and transportation services. It also moves arms and drugs. From 1991 to 2003, Far West is said to have moved 300 tons of heroin into Western Europe. Vladimir Filin, head of Far West, told a Russian interviewer that his firm was co-founded by an important American corporation. He added that Far West indirectly cooperates with the US government.

We cooperate with the American side in the sphere of commercial transportation not on the basis of direct commercial contracts between our agency [Far West, Ltd.] and the U. S. government, but through the intermediary company co-founded by the agency and a private U.S. company, which in its turn also interacts with the U.S. government.

It is difficult to decipher what that means, but the name Halliburton comes to mind. In 2005, he and two other co-founders,Anton Surikov, and Alexei Likhvintsev, visited President Bush in the White House. Thereafter he and his partners relocated to Dubai and Europe to escape possible arrest. Surikov is considered a retired officer of the Russian GRU as well as a political scientist who opposes Boris Yeltsin and President Vladimir Putin. He admits a connection to CIA agent Fritz Ermarth, who served on the National Security Council twice and retired in 1998. At a 2003 conference in Geneva, Surikov was accused of being a CIA man. As late as 1999, Ermarth was arranging for guns and money to reach a Chechen group that also sold drugs in Europe. OneRuslan Saidov ( sometimes Yasenev) , also part of the Russian mafia, also works various sides of the street including Saudi Arabia, and was paid by the CIA in 2004 to eliminate an Arab leader in Chechnyua who was likely to move from Chehnya to Iraq. The Russian mafia often works through Alpha Bank, which is probably its subsidiary. That bank has business relationships with Halliburton. In 1995 a huge drug warehouse controlled by the bank was burglarized in Siberia and the burglary was investigated by Russian security police..

In the Middle East, Far West cooperates with Diligence ,LCC, a private military corporation founded by William Webster, former head of both the FBI and CIA. These firm also work with recently founded New Bridge Strategies, which is headed by Joseph Allbaugh. He was a campaign manager for Governor Bush as well as his chief-of-staff and he later became head of FEMA. Other partners are George H.W. Bush aids Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith. The firm has close ties to Neil Bush.

The killing of two American Special Forces soldiers and the kidnaping of Russian diplomats in 2006 was involved with a Bout-related black operation that seems to have gone rogue. Team 121 was comprised of Russian, Israeli, and British mercenaries and was supposed to be used combating private militias in Iraq and turning them against one another. The team was created through the combined efforts of Bout, the Olive Group ( a subsidiary of Blackwater in the United Kingdom, and the Bosnian Defense Fund, of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. That entity works largely through the Riggs Bank and dates back to the days of the first President Bush. It has had clear links to Al Qasser and Bout .Both of these dealers were involved in the drug trade and moving arms to the Muslim rebels. It has been estimated that at one point, the Kosovo Liberation Front controlled almost 70% of the heroin moving into Europe.


Wayne Madsen, a usually reliable reporter, has been strongly hinting that Bout and the Russian-Ukranian-Israeli weapons-smuggling Mafia has ties to Richard Cheney and other people in the White House. Madsen states flatly that Richard Armitage, undersecretary of State, had been involved in shady dealings in Azerbaijan. The former NSA employee also notes that US Special Forces in Afghanistan are heavily involved in the opium trade and are moving shipments through Turkey and the Balkans with the help of the Russian Mafia and Greek criminals. Madsen notes elsewhere that the Turkish Army is also a major drug trader, so it can be assumed that they participate in this trade. Victor Bout is reportedly a major player in this trade. Two of Bout’s big planes have been spotted frrequently in Kabul and also at the US military base in Frankfurt.

It is not clear that the US moved into the Afghan drug trade immediately after its war there. Prior to the war, the US allied with Afghanistan’s chief narcobaron, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was an opponent of the Taliban. Another drug baron all was Haji Zaman, and the US persuaded the Pakistanis to release from prison his Pakistani partner Haji Ayub Afridi. These men were also tied to t he Russian mafia and some of their profits got to the Chechnyan rebels. It is possible that at that stage, the US entered into these unsavory alliances as a way of weakening the Russian state. However, by 2006, the US was so deeply involved in the Afghan poppy business that there were complaints about Special Forces hogging the trade and working with “Victor Bout. Some point out that Special Forces had provided the muscle to help the CIA move drugs elsewhere and simply assume this was a resumption of business as usual. A more benevolent interpretation from a conservative publication was that the US had to permit the resumption of the opium trade in order to support the dollar. While Madsen suggests that Cheney and others are running some sort of business on their own, it is much more likely that they have just piggy-backed onto a government operated drug trade that serves some national interests. It could just be a repeat and expansion of what happened under Reagan and the first Bush.

On October 22, 2006, the Iraqi government reported that $600 million had been siphoned off in arms deals. Bout and the Russian mafia were not mentioned. One cannot help wondering, if they were involved, and if any high American officials were participating in dividing the spoils.

The more one digs, the more apparent it is that intelligence agencies, sometimes arms of government, some politicians, and the international underworld all swin in the same muddy water and frequently do business with one another.

Victor Bout: The World’s Leading Dealer in Illegal Arms

Viktor Vasilevich Bout ( pronounced “butt” or” bott”) has become the world’s largest dealer in illegal arms , and he achieved this status in a short period of time. Today, the US and the UN officially try to prevent people and countries from dealing with him, yet US contractors in Iraq are still using his services.

Bout is a prominent member of the Russian mafia.. His record of fueling mayhem and murder in Africa and violating US embargoes has led the UN, the United States, and some other nations to join in blacklisting him and forbidding transactions with him Despite its own measures against him , the administration of George W. Bush continues to do business with him and with the Russian mafia.

KGB Major Bout was stati0oned at a Russian base in Angola in 1991.Vic tor was born in Tajikistan in 1967 of Russian parents who had tangential ties to important families, including the Andropovs. He was fluent in six languages. When the soviet empire collapsed in that year, he became an arms dealer, using old Soviet planes Bout started by purchasing three old Antonov planes and soon had 250 to 300 employees, mostly Russians, Ukranians, and Arminians. A Human Rights Watch official said that by 2000 Bout operated the “McDonalds of arms-trafficking.”

He soon became an important figure in the Russian-Ukranian mafia. These underworld people enjoyed the protection of the Russian military and Ministry of Defense. Bout entered business when it was characterized by Yeltsin-era, small, disorganized crime and he would make the transition to Putin- era organized crime ventures. His ties for what passed as the Russian mafia were very important, but he preferred to work as a lone wolf on specific operations .built around his air cargo business.

The Russian mafia had access to a $32 billion weapons stockpile in the Ukraine. It even included helicopters. Even Ukranian president Leonid Kuchma was caught dealing weapons in 1998-2000. Some went to Saddam Hussein. According to the Russian investigators, a worldview drug mega cartel has emerged in which the Russian mafia played a major role. They believe that Yeltsin crime family was an important player in the cartel, and they insist that the Bush family, centered in the current administration, is now a major player. Whether or not that is true, it is known that George H.W. Bush refused to cooperate in an international investigation of Russian mafia money laundering in Switzerland.

These elements participate in a international drug trade that could approach something between $500 million and $1.2 trillion a year. Representatives of its component elements met at the villa of Adnan Khashoggi at Beaulieu, near Nice, France in July 1999. He was once said to the “the richest man in the world.” There were also representatives of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, the Russian Mafia, and Venezuela. Also present were representativs of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a major drug dealing operation. This cartel deals with Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, FACA rebels in Columbia, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the CIA, and Russian Military Intelligence(GRU). . Dr. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, traces the predecessors of the meta group back to the CIA-sponsored bank BCCI, and before that to cooperative ventures centering in the agency and Myer Lansky. Scott writes that a second drug cartel operates the traffic from Burma into the enterprise zones of southern China, and he has little information on how the two networks might be connected.

With assistance of the Russian mafia, Bout has moved weapons out of the Ukraine and Bulgaria. He soon established a base in Ostend, Belgium and sold weapons to many parties in Africa, to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then to the Taliban. Bout denied working for the Taliban and The Belgians indicted him for money laundering and conspiracy and put out an international arrest warrant. Bouts planes were used for personal transportation before 9/11 according to Andrew Gilligan of the Evening Standard.

Bout moved to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates , where, he established close business ties to the former ambassador to the US, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Saqr al Nayhan, a member of the Dhabi ruling family. The UAE plays an important role in the Afghan drug trade as opium is shipped there, where it is heavily taxed, and some of that tax money has made itw way back to terrorists. The Village Voice speculated that the failed Dubai plan to purchase US ports would have made it much easier to get drugs into the U.S. He has found the UAE a convenient place to do business with Abdul Qayyum Shaikh, a major central Asian dealer in illegal arms.

Arms merchants like Bout make it possible by moving huge quantities of illegal weapons to illegal destinations. Bout has also established a major base in Gambia, where he has used his influence to mov e huge quantities of illegal blood diamonds. Later, the US ignored his actrivities in the illegal diamonds trade in return for flying arms to the Northen Alliance when it was fighting the Afghan Taliban. He was also involved in business arrangements with dictator Charles Taylor in Liberia. Again, they were moving diamonds. The diamond gangs are known for killing, , rape and murder. Taylor was a business partner of Pat Robertson, a major figure in the illegal diamond trade, and those diamonds were moved on the evangelist’s “Operation Blessing” aircraft. Bout, who owns about 50 Russian planes, has also supplied Philippine extremists Abu Sayyaf Group It estimated that he has supplied arms for every war and insurgency in Africa in the past decade and a half. Perhaps his greatest achievement was arming child soldiers in Sierra Leon. During the slaughter in Rwanda, he armed the Hutu and also flew in French peacekeepers. He operated many companies and many fronts. The first was Transavia Export Company, founded in 1991. He has been accused by a usually reliable correspondent of supplying Osama bin Laden, but he denies it.

Bout claims that all his ventures are legitimate cannot believed, but a majority might be. One of his businesses is flying frozen chickens to Africa. He has enough legitimacy to enable Vladimir Putin to befriend him. Twice Bout flew UN peace keepers to Somalia and East Timor and he was also active selling arms in Kosovo and neighboring areas. Two united Nations Commissions cited him for breaking embargoes, and the US Treasury in 2005 and 2006 froze his US assets. There is a strong nexus between people like Bout and terrorism.