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WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:  "GUNRUNNERS, DRUG SMUGGLERS & SUITCASE SALESMEN"

If the FBI was 'covering' for Rudi Dekkers, it wouldn't be out of love for the chubby flight school owner, universally loathed. No; they would, instead, be shielding the involvement of the entity, or organization, for whom Dekkers toiled. If the entity being shielded was, say, another Federal Agency, the FBI might have a lot of incentive to cover-up.

The task of identifying the organization being shielded by the FBI's incompetent and indifferently- motivated 9/11 investigation was made easier by events which played out right in front of us in Venice, which clearly demonstrate the scope and reach of the organization involved, and which seem to point a finger towards, in all likelihood, the CIA.

Surprised? We weren't either.

There is even historical precedent for the FBI covering up for the CIA. During the investigation into the Kennedy assassination, the Bureau flatly refused to investigate a CIA covert operation just outside of New Orleans, a training camp for Cuban exiles where CIA agent and all-around freak David Ferrie rubbed elbows with Lee Harvey Oswald at a camp which provided personnel and logistics support for the assassination conspirators.

The camp was studiously ignored by the FBI's New Orleans office, which again covered up for the 'renegade' camp a dozen years later in testimony in front of Congressional committees looking into the assassination.

But it will take more than historical precedent to level accusations against the CIA of involvement in Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers' misbegotten Arab training operation. There needs to be hard evidence. And hard evidence is a difficult thing to find in professional intelligence operations. A parking permit from a CIA parking lot in Langley was not going to be discovered on the dashboard of one of Rudi Dekkers' many expensive cars. There wasn't going to be any sort of obvious paper trail. At best there might be some bread crumbs pointing towards what used to be a paper trail.

We recalled a recent conversation we'd had with a man who had been the personal pilot for famed CIA pilot and operative Barry Seal for several years before Seal was assassinated in 1986.

Phil Marshall flew Barry Seal's Lear jet for two years. Yet when we asked him what Barry Seal did for a living, Marshall said he'd been kept in the dark about the nature of his boss's business. Still, he said, after a certain amount of time watching Seal move in and out of countries and capitals all over the Western hemisphere, he concluded that his job had something to do with selling guns and drugs. It also involved a moderate amount of heavy lifting: carrying suitcases bulging with money and drugs up and down the steps of the plane.

"I decided that Barry must have been a gunrunner, a drug smuggler, or a suitcase salesman," laughed Marshall.

It was an apt, if wry, description of the world of the covert operative, and we have seen quite a bit of just that kind of behavior in the world inhabited by Mohamed Atta, Rudi Dekkers, and Wallace J. Hilliard.

Then something happened involving Hilliard and Dekkers, not in Venice or Naples, but up in Lynchburg, Virginia, at the Lynchburg Regional Airport, which revealed the two men's connections to American intelligence.

We got a letter from a reporter in Lynchburg, Virginia, telling us that a recent government move out at the Lynchburg Airport had a strange Venice, Florida twist to it that had left aviation observers in Virginia scratching their heads.

"Hello sir," the letter began. "My name is Chris Flores and I'm the business reporter at the Lynchburg News & Advance, a 40,000 daily in Lynchburg, Virginia."

Flores was writing, he said, because an unknown company called Britannia Aviation had just been awarded a five-year contract to run a large regional maintenance facility at the Lynchburg Virginia Regional Airport, over Virginia Aviation, a much better-qualified local firm, in suspicious circumstances that hinted at the involvement of a very influential, if invisible and mysterious, 'presence,' with the ability to directly affect government decision-making in Lynchburg.

"Virginia Aviation was really pissed that they lost the bid to a little company in Florida for this large facility," explained the reporter. "Right away, Virginia Aviation's VP Jim Lampmann started questioning this company's credentials, to the point where I'd be setting the paper up for liability if I printed it. It seemed like the talk of a monopolist who doesn't want more competition. However, he did point out that Britannia did not have an FAA license to work on planes; (yet) Britannia plans to set up a large operation here to work on regional carriers for Delta and U.S. Air (Express)."

"Lampmann said, 'I would hope the city would do due diligence before they turn over a major facility.' And he was right. They didn't have the FAA license. Paul Marten, the Brit who is VP of the company, said he didn't have the license because they were just working out of a small hangar on planes for Huffman Aviation under Huffman's license," Flores wrote us ...

"Which goes back to your boy Dekkers."

Someone behind the scenes had been pulling strings in Virginia to win a government contract for a company housed in a hangar at Huffman Aviation in Venice. Nobody in Virginia could figure out why.

And that's when the CIA's links to Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard finally began to come into focus. At a Lynchburg City Council hearing on the dispute, we learned there had been vocal objections from local aviation observers baffled at why a company with no qualifications was being awarded a contract over a much better-qualified local Lynchburg aviation company for a large regional maintenance facility designed for major carriers.

"It was as if someone with a learner's permit from the DMV got picked to drive Richard Petty's car at Daytona," explained one Lynchburg aviation executive. "It made absolutely no business sense that anyone could see."

Ah, we thought. Maybe we can help here. We had begun to feel comfortable in the mysterious but increasingly familial realm of things which make "absolutely no business sense."

***

When Britannia was chosen for the contract in Lynchburg, local Lynchburg news reports on the controversy questioned why the tiny unknown firm from Venice was being shoe-horned in at the Lynchburg Airport. "Some commission members were concerned that they hadn't seen details of Britannia's bid until this past Wednesday, and that the company's un-audited finances weren't given to commissioners until some had asked for it," the Lynchburg News and Advance reported.

The city's response was not to worry about it, as if it were only a question of collecting the rent. "As a result of the questions raised concerning financial fitness," said Airport Manager Mark Courtney, "we put a clause in requiring Britannia to put down the first six months of rent."

Folks in Lynchburg were hardly reassured, and aviation executives began voicing their concerns to reporters at the local paper. They pointed out that Britannia's financial statements, released only after prodding by the local aviation community, showed the "company" to be worth less than $750, with virtually no assets, employees, or corporate history. In fact, it had only recently incorporated.

If ever there was a transparent dummy 'front' company Britannia Aviation was it. It didn't even possess the necessary FAA license to perform the aircraft maintenance services for which it had just been contracted. Yet it had been chosen over a respected and successful local Lynchburg company which boasted a multi-million dollar balance sheet and more than 40 employees.

No one knew anything about Britannia Aviation, other than that it had been housed at Huffman Aviation. Still, the airport manager, who had recently moved over from the FAA, greased the way for the company, and the City Fathers of Lynchburg agreed. Out at the Lynchburg Airport, everyone wanted to know what gave Britannia its 'stroke' with government officials.

What was it about Huffman Aviation that prompted government officials to so consistently strew rose petals in its path? Recall that Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers' hasty purchase of Huffman without prior government approval had exposed them to serious business losses if they didn't receive quick government approval for a lease at the airport. What made them so certain that the City Council of Venice would rubber stamp their deal?

What was it about these guys that made government officials go out of their way to smooth their progress at every step?

***

The U.S. Government loves Rudi Dekkers ... The man who trained both pilots who hit the World Trade Center was getting a cool million in government cash. The government was giving away money to Dutch national Dekkers ...

"Rudi was going to get an SBA loan when he was indicted," Venice Airport observer Max Burge told us. "He had a letter of approval for an $800,000 loan."

In light of such massive malfeasance, we thought business reporter Chris Flores struck the right tone of ironic understatement. "There was some sentiment that there might be something suspicious about Britannia Aviation," he wrote us. "There was a clear feeling that nobody knew who these guys were, or where they were coming from."

What began as a purely local spat has clear national security implications.

The connection between Hilliard, Dekkers, and the CIA was inadvertently revealed during a raucous Lynchburg City' Council meeting over citizen complaints about the City awarding a $5 million contract to a company worth less than a typical business lunch. A Lynchburg city official used a little humor to try to wave aside objections that Britannia was insolvent.

"At least they have more on their balance sheet than Enron," joked Lynchburg City Councilman Robert Garber.

The Britannia executive in attendance, Paul Marten, who is British, rose to angrily protest that it was untrue his company was worth less than $750 ...

Britannia's assets, he felt sure, amounted to more than that. How much more was a question he left unanswered.

To illustrate the company's solidity and reassure those in attendance, Marten boasted that his company had already and for some time been successfully providing aviation maintenance services at Huffman's hangar at the Venice Airport, for a Caribbean carrier called Caribe Air.

"Marten has said in the past that he works on planes in a hangar in Venice for Huffman Aviation," reported the Lynchburg News-Advance. "Marten also said Britannia does a similar service to what it wants to do in Lynchburg at the Venice Airport with Caribbean airlines, including Caribe Air."

And that's how we learned that under Rudi Dekkers' FAA license Paul Marten's little dummy front company worked for a notorious CIA proprietary air carrier.

"You might want to look at the history of Caribe Air," said reporter Flores drolly. "I think one of the original co-owners was some huge drug runner for the Medellin Cartel."

Even by the standards of a CIA proprietary, Caribe Air has had a particularly checkered past, including such 'blemishes' as having its aircraft seized at the infamous Mena, Arkansas airport in 1990, after being accused by government prosecutors of using as many as 20 planes to ship drugs worth -- get this -- billions of dollars into the country.

Caribe Air also made headlines during the Iran Contra scandal after one of their planes, a C-130 military cargo plane, was shot down over Angola with the loss of everyone aboard.

Unfortunately for Caribe Air, the "everyone on board" included a US Congressman's nephew. In the resulting publicity it was let slip that the plane, laden with a cargo of whiskey and cigarettes, had been on a mission for the Angolan government.

Observers at the time had noted this fact with some surprise, since the CIA had been for years covertly supporting the Angolan government's opposition, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rebels. The death of the Congressman's nephew revealed the Agency to once again be playing both ends against the middle ... at least when it came to planeloads of swag.

Although the Congressman with a dead nephew was unamused, the matter was quickly dropped.

Today Caribe Air is controlled by an offshore bank located on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Banc Caribe, a private bank which is being investigated by authorities pursuing Enron's secret offshore partnerships, some of which have the name "Caribe" in their title.

This is probably just coincidence.

When details of the Lynchburg controversy reached Venice, local aviation executives professed amazement. "No one here had ever heard of Britannia Aviation before," Coy Jacob told us. "And this is a very small airport."

Someone had decided there was too much heat on the Venice Airport for a covert operation housed at Huffman Aviation to remain there, observers speculated. So they moved it to Lynchburg.

Intrigued, Venice aviation business owner Coy Jacob called a DEA source he knew at the airport and asked what he knew about Britannia Aviation.

"This guy got all excited as soon as I asked," Jacob told us later. "He immediately wanted to know why I was so interested in Britannia. Finally he reluctantly told me that Britannia had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport, whatever that means."

"He said the local Venice Police Department (which mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport since September 11, had been warned to leave them alone."

Rudi Dekkers was in trouble with the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) while still located at the Naples Airport in the mid-1990's. But things had changed.

There were some sinister currents swirling around the aviation scene in Southwest Florida. But the notion of a Federal "hands-off" policy towards the operation at Huffman helped explain what it means to have a "green light from the DEA." It certainly sounded like an impressive credential. So one day we wandered in to see Paul Martens -- unannounced of course, as he would never have spoken to us otherwise -- at his office in a Huffman Aviation hangar at the Venice Airport.

Martens refused to comment on the reports of covert influences having been responsible for winning the Lynchburg contract. He was just an honest British businessman, he protested. He had ties to Lynchburg, Virginia. He met his wife there, while she was a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he said. Her father had been a pastor for the Reverend Falwell.

Was there an evangelical Christian connection to our story? We had earlier noted that many of the flight trainers who trained the Arab terrorists moonlighted by flying missionary flights out of the Venice and Sarasota Airports for Christian missionary services like televangelist Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing.

"Islamic fundamentalist" Osama bin laden reportedly cloaked his covert activities under the cover of religious charities. Were our own government intelligence agencies using the same ruse?

"Jerry Falwell got bailed out in the early '90's by a local Lynchburg businessman with interesting associations," one Lynchburg observer told us. "Since then Falwell runs a missionary service called World Help, which flies all over the world."

Pat Robertson, we recalled, made the news after 9/11 when he invited Jerry Falwell onto his 700 Club to point a manicured finger at segments of American society both men felt were responsible for 9/11. Falwell surmised out loud that the horrors of 9/11 indicated God had lifted His "veil of protection" from the United States be- cause of various transgressions, including attempts to "secularize" the nation by pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle," decreed Falwell. "The ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped make this happen."'

"Well, I totally concur," responded Pat Robertson, who went Falwell one better by adding that "rampant Internet pornography" was also to blame for God's anger.

"If we don't repent, then more events might happen in the future," Falwell chimed in.

Venerable CBS news-anchor Walter Cronkite expressed his disgust at the duo to TV Guide. "It makes you wonder if Falwell and Robertson are worshipping the same God as the people who bombed the Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Meanwhile, the consternation in Lynchburg did not diminish in the months after Britannia moved in. Instead, suspicions grew even greater, Lynchburg aviation observers told us, because of the "secretive nature" of the operations going on at the facility.

"No one knows anything about this group," Virginia Aviation's Jim Lampmann said.

"They took over a sizeable maintenance facility and all they're doing is working on a few old, broken-down Jetstreams. But they keep their hangar doors down and closed. They stay strictly to themselves and keep their shades pulled down. Their activity consists of one plane coming in and one plane going out every few weeks or so."

We knew what he was getting at: the "no business sense" thing. He said, "There's no way they can be making any money in an operation like that."

Christian-linked or not, a transparent dummy front company had a 'green light' from the DEA. So it was natural to wonder whether Robertson and Falwell were part of some as-yet unrevealed U.S. covert operation.

Our suspicions grew when we discovered one reason Britannia was able to move so smoothly from Venice to Lynchburg. Huffman Aviation's shadowy financier, Wally Hilliard, loaned Jerry Falwell a million bucks which the televangelist has shown no indication of repaying.

Only a cynic would suggest Falwell may have spread some of the money around town. But then, a million bucks does buy a lot of "looking the other way."

Falwell certainly needed the money. He was being foreclosed on -- in a supreme irony -- by a creditor who chose to place business before sentiment when Falwell couldn't repay his debts: Stephens, Inc., the Arkansas financial institution run by Jackson Stephens, who has been so influential, as we've seen, in Venice. In 1991 Stevens, Inc. foreclosed on the North Campus of Jerry's pride and joy, Liberty University.

That Jackson Stephens was also a generous patron of that minion of Satan, Bill Clinton, didn't stop Falwell from taking his money.

Business is business.

***

Financier Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, managed to avoid being caught in the glare of publicity surrounding his partner Dekkers. But that changed when Britannia Aviation became embroiled in controversy in Falwell's Lynchburg, Virginia.

The revelation of Hilliard's ties with Falwell shed light on things.

The Lord works in mysterious ways; but this was clearly no coincidence. Was Hilliard a representative of a large and powerful but largely invisible Company?

Had he been tasked with the covert flight training operation in Florida?

So, what did we really know about Wally Hilliard? The answer was not enough. A successful entrepreneur from Green Bay, Wisconsin, Hilliard supposedly retired to Naples, Florida, in the mid-'90s, only to go on a buying spree of aviation assets in southwest Florida that ran into the tens of millions of dollars with a partner, Rudi Dekkers, who had been the subject of a recent multi- Agency Federal investigation and whose reputation as a deadbeat was so bad that no one would sell him aviation fuel at the Naples, FL. Airport ... for cash.

As we learned more about Hilliard, a picture of the shadowy financier began to slowly fall into place. We discovered, for example, that the health insurance company he founded had a highly unusual corporate motto:

"Hate Sin, Fight Communism, and Back the Pack!"

While this may cover a lot of bases, motivation-wise, with insurance salesmen, it is way too odd for a regular health insurance company.

We learned more odd facts about Hilliard from Stuart Burchill, his former accountant. We virtually staked out Burchill's house in Naples after hearing several aviation executives close to Hilliard's operations in Naples state emphatically that Burchill didn't just know where all the bodies were buried, he also knew where they were sent to be cut up before they were buried.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Burchill told us that at one time Hilliard had assigned him the task of dunning deadbeat Falwell, the founder of Liberty University and Pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, to repay the money Falwell owed his boss.

"The Falwell note was an outstanding receivable I was assigned to collect," Burchill explained.

This was almost too rich. As always, truth is stranger than fiction. But it got even better. In the course of trying to get Falwell to address the unpaid debt, Burchill said, he learned details of the Reverend's accounting practices upon which the Almighty Himself would presumably frown.

"I talked to Falwell's accountant, who was very apologetic," said Burchill. "He said there was plenty of money to pay off the loan. Except any time there was money left in the account at the end of the month, Jerry always stripped it out."

At this point we admit to being slightly giddy with glee. If the avuncular Southern Baptist minister had been "stripping out" his church's bank account at the end of the month, his pastoral image might suffer.

Burchill said: "Falwell's accountant told me, 'if I can pay you in chunks off the books so Jerry doesn't see it, I can get it handled.' So we worked out a payment schedule. And after that checks drawn on Liberty University came in for a few months, until Falwell figured out what was going on and put a stop to it."

Hilliard also had other ties to the Evangelical Christian milieu. Ties that -- given his involvement with Atta's Hamburg cadre -- were frankly disturbing ...

In addition to the loan to televangelist Falwell to bail out his failing religious enterprises, he served on the board of an avowedly Christian aeronautics company planning to manufacture a new business jet in Israel.

He was a Director of a company in St. Louis, VisionAire Corp., an aircraft developer attempting to attract funding to manufacture a six-seat business jet in Israel.

Like Hilliard's failed airline, which announced new service between Orlando and Daytona Beach and failed to attract a single customer, VisionAire spent millions developing a business jet ...

But they never sold a plane.

The company's CEO and head "VisionAire," Jim Rice, was a former religious fundraiser who ran the business as something of a religious crusade. When Rice was asked why he founded the company, for example, he credited divine inspiration. "I had been wondering what God wanted me to do next," he said in an interview. "When I pray, it's more listening than asking. The more I listened, the more I felt this is what He wanted me to do."

VisionAire's headquarters at Spirit of St. Louis Airport was described by the St, Louis Post-Dispatch as having an "undercurrent of spirituality," with one employee telling the paper she was attracted to working at the company by the "strong Christian faith" of top management.

Faith must have been sorely tested, however, during the brouhaha surrounding a $30 million civil lawsuit filed against the company by two former officers. After they complained to CEO Rice that he had misled investors about the company's prospects for FAA certification, they alleged, all -- forgive the expression -- hell broke loose.

The two had been having an illicit affair. In retaliation for their allegations, the company "caused video recordings to be made of plaintiffs' private activities," and then "unreasonably publicized private and personal details of plaintiffs' lives."

Ouch! That must have hurt. How Christian is that?

VisionAire Corp. officials eventually won dismissal of the suit, but it was a Pyrrhic Victory, since they never won FAA approval for their plane. As the company's finances worsened, some "enraptured" employees ended up working for free, or even subsidizing their employer by using their personal credit cards to pay for company expenses.

One former employee told a reporter, "A lot of us felt the company let us down. Not intentionally, but we felt bitter and kind of stupid for listening to Jim Rice in the first place."

CEO Rice was confronted by one investor who angrily told him, "My investment isn't worth anything now!"

Yet another company connected to the people connected to Mohamed Atta suffering the cruel indignity of forced bankruptcy.

In a bid to keep the company and plane alive, Rice solicited Israeli involvement. A July 3, 2001 press release from Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) describes Israeli plans to help the manufacturer attract funding to manufacture the six-seat business jet in Israel.

Wally Hilliard's political connections continued to surprise us.  He has ties extending well into the upper reaches of American political circles. These ties hold the answers to questions about how sophisticated operators like Hilliard and Dekkers could have been hoodwinked and taken in by foreign student pilots who demonstrated none of 'the right stuff.'

At the same time his Venice flight school was training dozens of terrorists to fly he was involved with Truman Arnold, a multi-millionaire Texas oil-man who played a prominent role in the Whitewater Scandal.

Arnold, chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party in 1995 when the scandal broke, was investigated for a variety of dubious money-raising schemes ranging from renting out the White House's Lincoln Bedroom to selling tickets on Air Force One. And he was fingered for procuring cash (read hush money) for convicted Clinton friend Web Hubbell.

Arnold, who played golf with Clinton regularly, coordinated payments to Webster Hubbell from businesses controlled by old friends of the President's, as well as campaign donors that included the Lippo Group, in business with (who else?) Jackson Stephens, and organizers of a multibillion-dollar development in China that had received the endorsement of the Clinton administration.

Truman Arnold's name surfaced in connection with our investigation into the Venice, Florida, flight schools in a curious aircraft transaction we unearthed while probing into Hilliard's tangled business affairs.

Arnold, it appears, 'loaned' Hilliard -- for a dollar -- a Beechcraft King Air 200 worth over $2 million. It wasn't until almost a year after the airplane sale that Hilliard got around to arranging financing to pay for the plane.

Truman Arnold engaged in his act of munificence in December 2000. So Wally Hilliard had a benefactor at the heart of the American political process, again raising the question of whether the appearance of Mohamed Atta and his terrorist buddies in Venice, Florida, was -- as the official story has it -- a matter of mere happenstance.

Truman Arnold's lawyer during the Whitewater Investigation was Democratic power-broker Richard Ben-Veniste, who is currently serving on the official 9/11 probe. So if Ben-Veniste's client Truman Arnold's business dealings with terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard come under scrutiny, the slick Washington lawyer will find himself playing two different angles in a major American scandal for the second time!

Richard Ben-Veniste has been a player in major American scandals, in roles that are often not clearly-defined, going all the way back to Watergate. Now serving on his third major national investigative panel (Watergate, Whitewater, and 9/11), he may be about to face the same criticism all over again.

Ben-Veniste already served as Majority Counsel to the Congressional Whitewater probe investigating Truman Arnold. He went on to defend Arnold before Ken Starr's Whitewater grand jury, an action for which he was roundly criticized.

Observers tarred the Democratic super lawyer, claiming Ben-Veniste, while serving as Democratic counsel to the Whitewater Committee, blocked inquiries about Webster Hubbell's hiring by the Lippo Group, and then turned around and defended a man, Truman Arnold, whom he had just been investigating.

"Truman Arnold's name never came up during the Whitewater investigation," Ben-Veniste wrote, addressing his critics, "because of the entirely collateral nature of the inquiry about Hubbell and Lippo ... And given Arnold's total lack of involvement in any aspect of the matters before the Whitewater Committee, no honest argument can be made that my representation of Arnold transgresses professional guidelines."

But Ben-Veniste's turning up at the 'scene of the crime,' is by no means the oddest thing about Truman Arnold and Wallace Hilliard's aviation transaction ... That distinction would have to go to the aircraft bill of sale which conveyed the plane from Arnold to Hilliard.

Dated December 10, 2000, it was not submitted to the FAA until almost a year later, January 31, 2002. While the purpose of this arrangement is unclear, one reason, aviation sources indicated, might be that had the plane come under law enforcement scrutiny during this interregnum, the person coming under suspicion would have been -- not Wally Hilliard, the man using the plane -- but Truman Arnold, still the owner of record.

Considering that the December 10, 2000 transfer date for the twin-engine King Air came right after Hilliard had lost his bid to retain possession of his Lear jet confiscated by the DEA, this is no small benefit. Because after the "blemish" of having a plane he owned found with 43 pounds of heroin, Mr. Hilliard's name, understandably, was 'mud' for a while with federal authorities.

Nonetheless, Hilliard continued putting together a company, Florida Air Holdings, which again was bravely planning to offer commuter air service in Florida. After briefly flying in the Spring of 2001, when it was touted by Florida political luminary Katherine Harris, Hilliard was no doubt eager to lose some more money.

We could hear it in our head, like a mantra. "When things don't make business sense, sometimes its because they do make sense ... just in some other way."

Hilliard's latest ill-starred aviation enterprise also offered commuter service under the name Discover Air. After not one ticket was sold on its inaugural route, it went -- almost immediately -- out of business.

Notwithstanding this uniquely dismal record, for reasons un-known, Florida political luminary Gov. Jeb Bush stepped forward to tour its facilities and praise its completely un-praiseworthy management.

***

One of the first decisions of the current U.S. Administration was, strangely enough, a change in drug policy. After President Bush's swearing-in in January 2000, the State Department announced the change of policy, instructing the U.S. Ambassador to Columbia, Anne Hamilton to "stop its opium eradication activities in favor of eliminating coca."

When he found out, Republican Dan Burton was livid, and brought the matter before his House Government Reform Committee. "In 2000 we saw initial success with the heroin strategy," Burton stated in the hearing. "Our allies and the Colombian National Police eradicated 9,200 hectares of opium poppy plants in Colombia's high Andes Mountains. This put a serious dent into the supply of heroin coming into the United States."

"It was then that the State Department chose to stop opium eradication," fumed Burton, "to, as Ambassador Patterson put it, 'take advantage of a historic opportunity to eradicate coca."' "Eradication of opium with the new Black Hawks that we gave them last year was stopped -- stopped while the coca eradication in the south took a priority," Burton said during the hearings.

"And the only problem is Colombia's cocaine is now increasingly headed in another direction: to Europe. And the opium poppy used to make more deadly Colombian heroin is almost exclusively headed to the United States of America and our East Coast."

***

The Truman Arnold Company today tops the Arkansas Business list of that state's largest private companies. It unseated -- you can't make this stuff up -- Jackson Stephens Inc. of Little Rock, long unchallenged as the state's largest private company.

No doubt all of this is mere coincidence, without the slightest relevance to an understanding of what happened in America on September 11th, 2001.

Because, according to the FBI, which should know, the 19 hijackers had no help from any outside organization while in this country. They were a Lone Cadre.

***

Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers' purchase of Huffman Aviation in 1999 set in motion a chain of events that led directly to people hanging out of 100th story office windows in New York and asking themselves whether it would be less painful to jump.

Like the Arab terrorist bombers of the early '90s, some of whom also attended U.S. flight schools, Atta's terrorist cadre clustered around a handful of flight schools, leading to speculation that the hijackers may not have enjoyed completely unfettered access to any flight school in America they pleased. They appear to have been siphoned into only a few. It is not clear to us that if Hilliard and Dekkers had not teamed up in their unholy alliance that the terrorists would have just gone to another school.

Do the political connections of the owner of the flight school Mohamed Atta called home provide a rationale for questioning the official story told by the U.S. Government about the terrorists being in this country on their own and receiving no outside help?

Hell yes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE:  THE EUROPEAN CONNECTION

So Mohamed Atta's American hosts -- Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard -- are not who they pretend to be.

But the same could be said of Atta, as well. As we've seen, he exhibited behavior which is totally inconsistent with that of an "Islamic fundamentalist," however broadly defined. But his behavior was consistent with that of a member of his society's -- Arab society's -- privileged elite, who also happened to be a spy.

The people he consorted with in Florida, his Florida associates, were not exclusively -- perhaps even predominantly -- Arab.

From information gleaned first in interviews with Amanda Keller, Atta's one-time American girlfriend, and corroborated by independent sources in Venice and Naples, we confirmed that at least seven of Mohamed Atta's close associates in Florida during the year leading up to the 9/11 attack were European: German, Swiss and French.

Today we know at least something -- but by no means enough -- about the identities of each. Their names haven't surfaced in any press accounts about Atta's stay in the U.S., nor has their existence been mentioned or alluded to in official statements.

We know they were all pilots.

According to Amanda, all of them already had pilot licenses from other countries when they arrived in the U.S. Traveling with Atta, or meeting him around the state. Atta's European friends appeared to share relationships with him of long-standing. Their meetings were serious business; when they returned, said Amanda, Atta and his German associates "always came back glum."

Only one of the seven still resides in the U.S.; five live in Germany or Switzerland. The seventh has a criminal record in his native Germany, and today lives in Saudi Arabia.

Cabdriver Bob Simpson referred to Rudi and Mohamed as "partners in crime." He thought the two men shared both social and business connections. He said they were very close socially. As we've seen on one pickup during the summer of 2001, Simpson drove them to Sarasota to a bar on Main Street.

Amanda had made frequent references to a close friend of Atta's named 'Wolfgang,' a friend so close Atta called him 'my brother.'

"He called certain people, Arabic people, 'my brother,' Amanda said. "And I was wondering how he had so many family members. Like gang members do, you know, 'this is my brother.' But not all Arabs. So it wasn't like anyone who was Muslim was his brother."

"He called Wolfgang and Juergen 'my brother,"' she said. "He and Wolfgang were very tight, they went everywhere together. When he came into the picture they were together all the time."

Keller said Atta always spoke German with Wolfgang, which contradicts the testimony of Rudi Dekkers to a Congressional Committee that when he addressed Atta in German, Atta merely looked at him strangely.

Wolfgang's story, according to people we spoke with who knew him, includes a life studded with things like sailing around the world on a 47-foot yacht, on a trip where he met his wife Sujita, a native of Bombay. But when we went looking for Wolfgang, we found him through records of his scrapes with authorities in Florida. In airport records in Naples he was referenced in Aero Jet/ Ambassador correspondence. A letter was sent by a former employee soliciting to offer private flight instruction without authority and in violation of FAA rules.

Wolfgang Bohringer is a pilot in his thirties. In Spring 2002, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was one of the first of the 'German element' to arrive in Florida, in 1996, when he opened a flight school in Naples. Prior to arriving in Naples he was associated with an organization called "The Flying Club of Munich," in Augsburg, Germany.

Like Rudi and Wally, Wolfgang was notorious in aviation circles for bad behavior. "Wolfgang showed up from Munich in the mid-1990's and immediately began operating a flight school illegally," stated Marcus Huber, a flight instructor in Naples. "He's half Swiss, half German."

Also like Rudi and Wally, Wolfgang seemed to have a "hall pass" from federal authorities. This embittered other foreign flight trainers not similarly well-connected. "When Wolfgang applied for an E-2 Visa, he made up a fake company, a cleaning service," Huber told us. "Sometimes it makes me mad that a criminal gets preference."

Welcome to Terrorland.

Wolfgang was instrumental in bringing another of Atta's German associates to Florida, a pilot named "Stephan," who has done jail time in Germany, was on parole when he came to the U.S., and thus not supposed to be flying. But "being connected means never having to say you're sorry," and while regular German flight students struggle to obtain the necessary visas, Wolfgang and Stephan had inside connections which smoothed their progress. Stephan purchased Wolfgang's flight training business.

Two other close German associates of Mohamed Atta's in Florida were brothers, Peter and Stephan Verhaaren. "Stephan did eight months of jail time," Huber told us.

"He was convicted October 1, 1997 and released from parole in Nov. 2000. Wolfgang signed off on Stephan's books, and so Stephan also got in on a fraudulent business investor's visa."

Yet Stephan was running a Florida flight school, although there are more than a few laws that say he shouldn't have been. Presumably the FAA was "looking the other way."

Stephan today reportedly flies in Saudi Arabia for a Swiss carrier, Farnair.

Atta also was often seen with Rudi's head flight instructor, Francois Nicolai. "He's another guy with no papers," an aviation source told us, "but at least he's an excellent pilot. He's French, and Swiss."

From what she saw, Amanda said that all of Atta's friends, with the exception of Marwan Al- Shehhi, were either German and Dutch, including Dutchmen Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof, and another man from the Netherlands named 'Paul.' There was also Arne Kruithof's "agent" from Munich, as well as his business partner in Aviation Aspirations, Pascal Schreier. Pascal was close to Bohringer, Atta's closest friend among the German nationals.

Pascal Schreier is married to a woman named Sandra Hamouda, French Tunisian, who as we have seen bought the bankrupt flight school in Punta Gorda where Atta hung out early in 2001. She is an executive with a Florida flight school called Pelican Flight Training Center, a fact we might have overlooked except for a curious 'coincidence' ...

When the New York Times did a two year anniversary story on 9/11 called "Hard Times Are Plaguing Flight Schools in Florida" (September 14, 2003) focusing on the fact that pilot-training schools in Florida have been struggling since 9 /11, the two schools profiled in their story are Magic Dutch Boy Arne Kruithof's ... and Pelican Flight Training Center, where Pascal Schreirer's wife works.

There are over 220 flight schools in Florida. That the New York Times profiled these two "well- connected schools" is no doubt just a freak coincidence.

Another "old friend" of Atta's was a German named 'Juergen,' who was not the smoothest of operators. "Juergen was a pervert, straight out," Amanda had said "He was a lush, mid-30's. Every woman that walked by, he had something to say to them, commenting on their butt or whatever. He would go up to a woman, say 'I'm from Germany, and I want to touch an American woman's butt."'

We may have found 'Juergen,' working as a realtor in nearby Sarasota. Amanda recognized him from the picture in a YAHOO swinger's profile. Kurgus Juergen is the owner of Europe One, a company whose Florida incorporation papers lists the phone number of The Continental Cafe in Sarasota, a fictitious business name of Casablanca Rose Inc., whose two directors are Abeltif Mamdouh and Mustafa Ettaki.

Although he did tell us, unprompted, that he knew many people in the FBI, Juergen denied knowing Atta. And because we don't have a second source for the identification, we have to leave open the possibility that Amanda's photo confirmation was in error.

But not everyone has business partners named Abeltif and Mustafa.

***

The fact that Atta was being subsidized by U.S .taxpayers while he was in Hamburg hasn't been played up anywhere that we know about. But its true ...

For at least four of Atta's seven years living in Hamburg he was part of a 'joint venture' between the U.S. and German Governments, an elite international "exchange" program run by a little-known private organization which has close ties to powerful American political figures like David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

This fact has escaped notice as well.

Before becoming a terrorist ringleader, Atta enjoyed the patronage of a government initiative known as the "Congress-Bundestag Program," overseen by the U.S. State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the German equivalent of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The jointly-funded U.S.-German government effort picked up the tab for Atta on sojourns in Cairo, Istanbul, and Aleppo in Syria during the years 1994 and 1995, as well as employing him as a "tutor" and "seminar participant" during 1996 and 1997.

Atta's financial relationship with the U.S.-German government program probably extends back to his initial move from Egypt to Germany in 1992.

The news that Mohamed Atta had been on the payroll of the elite international program only surfaced in a whisper, just as quietly as news that Venice flight schools had trained a third terrorist pilot. It was in a brief seven-line report by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Oct. 18, 2001, under the headline "ATTA WAS TUTOR FOR SCHOLARSHIP HOLDERS."

The story quoted spokesmen for "Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft," described as a "German international further education organization," as having admitted paying Hamburg cadre principal Atta as a "scholarship holder" and "tutor," between 1995 and 1997.

When we found it, what seemed to make this story especially curious is that the German paper concealed the truly shocking implication of their story: that Mohamed Atta had been on the payroll of a joint U.S.-German government program. They did this through the simple expedient of neglecting to mention in the article that the "Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft" was a private entity administering the 'exchange' initiative of the two governments.

Maybe they forgot.

The U.S. end of the program, we discovered, is run out of an address at United Nations Plaza in New York, by the U.S. arm, called CDS International. The letters stand for Carl Duisberg Society, also the name of its German counterpart in Cologne, the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. They are named for the German chemist and industrialist who headed the Bayer Corporation during the 1920's.

The list of elite power brokers backing CDS International ranges from the aforementioned Kissinger and Rockefeller to former President Bill Clinton, and other Democratic heavyweights like former First Lady Hillary Clinton, and Clinton adviser Ira Magaziner. Kissinger showed his support by addressing over 100 international business leaders at an anniversary dinner organized and celebrating CDS International held at the River Club of New York, June 2, 1987, where he congratulated CDS International on its 20 years of service in keeping close business ties, not only between Germany and the United States, but more recently through career development programs for participants from "other countries" as well.

Five years later, Mohamed Atta became a participant from one of these "other" countries.

Then-President Bill Clinton also found a lot to like about CDS International. During his visit to Germany to commemorate the Berlin Airlift, he noted that the United States "will be working hard to expand our support" for the "Congress-Bundestag" exchange which "has already given more than 10,000 German and American students the chance to visit each other's countries."

Were he to give the same speech today, he would no doubt amend the wording to read "visit and vaporize".

CDS International, states the organization's literature, provides opportunities for young German engineers. Mohamed Atta wasn't, strictly speaking, a "young German engineer;" but apparently Kissinger's praise for "career development programs for participants from other countries as well" had been taken to heart.

"These young German engineers earn real world experience and are given assignments to contribute from the start," a program spokesman enthused in a newspaper interview.

The organization is today understandably shy about mentioning that their most famous recent graduate's "real world experience" included murdering almost 3,000 people in New York City in slightly less than two hours.

A financial relationship between the terrorist ringleader and the U.S. and German Governments has not previously even been hinted at in America's major media. The conspiracy-minded might conclude that this may owe something to the program's raft of politically-powerful boosters, giving it "big juice."

We prefer to think of it as an oversight.

***

Having "big juice" may also explain omissions in the story about Mohamed Atta's time in Germany in the March 7, 2003 Chicago Tribune.

Under the headline "9/11 haunts hijacker's sponsors; German couple talks of living with pilot Atta," the article described the 1992 meeting in Cairo between Atta and a German couple running an "international student exchange program."

Atta was recruited in Cairo by this mysterious German couple, dubbed the "hijacker's sponsors." It was this meeting, said the Tribune, which led Atta to move to Hamburg.

But although Tribune correspondent Stevenson Swanson cites this German couple for "having played such an important role in Atta's move to Germany," he never gives their names, nor that of the organization they worked for.

We thought good journalism was all about ... you know. Who. What. When. Where. Why.

The Chicago Tribune got unaccountably stuck on "Who."

During a visit to the Egyptian capital in fall 1991, the Tribune reported, the German couple stayed with friends who knew Atta's father, a Cairo lawyer, and his father's friends had then introduced the German couple to Atta.

"Atta, who had recently graduated with a degree in architectural engineering from the University of Cairo, told the couple he wanted to study architecture in Germany, but he had no particular idea where he should go," the paper reported.

Though the article neglects to mention it, the reason Atta found himself with "no particular idea where he should go" was that although he'd studied engineering at prestigious Cairo University, he hadn't done well enough to gain admission to its graduate school.

The paper quotes the German wife telling investigators: "In this first conversation, we suggested he continue his studies in Hamburg and offered him a place to live at our house."

Atta, she states, accepted their offer right away.

This magnanimous gesture by the German couple to an undistinguished young man they have just met may be normal behavior for this couple. Perhaps their gesture was just the very milk of human kindness.

Then again, perhaps it is something else. Why did this German couple leap at the opportunity to help a young man not considered promising enough to gain entrance to graduate school in Cairo? Offering him a place to live at their own home? The Tribune doesn't say. It also fails to identify either the couple or the "international" program they ran.

The story is 1,200 words in length. So its not as if they didn't report the names for space reasons. "Jane and John Doe from Help-A-Student International" would have sufficed. Just an extra ten words and they would have had it. You know: Who, What, When, Where and Why.

Either the Tribune just forgot the 'Who.' Or something more sinister occurred.

***

After studying German in Cairo, Atta arrived in Germany on July 24, 1992, according to investigator's records, and then lived rent-free for at least the next six months in the couple's home in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood.

Since just three years later Atta was on the payroll of the "Congress-Bundestag Program" it is reasonable to conclude -- no thanks to the Chicago Tribune -- that this was the "exchange program" responsible for bringing him to Germany in the first place.

CDS International's elite sponsors are apparently influential enough to have kept their organization's name out of the newspapers. Or, at any rate, out of the Chicago Tribune.

Here's something else we found curious about reports of Atta's time in Hamburg ... When he returned home for a three-month visit to Cairo in 1995, it was just as the Egyptian government was beginning to crack down viciously on Islamic fundamentalists.

Yet, strangely, Atta chose this exact time to grow a beard, traditionally a sign of a devout Muslim. It is assumed that Atta did this as a defiant political gesture to register his disgust at the secular elite that ruled his homeland.

At least, that's the way they tell the story ... Atta's two German traveling "companions" report that Atta said he would not be cowed by his home country's "fat cats," who he believed were criminalizing religious traditionalists while bowing shamefully to the West in foreign and economic policies.

At least that's what they say he said.

A more plausible explanation might be that growing a beard and assuming an "Islamic fundamentalist" pose was the act of a man "singing for his supper," by going undercover on behalf of people who were paying his room and board in Hamburg.

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