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

CHAPTER SIX: LOOKING FOR AMANDA

Our first stop in the search for Amanda was at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's local Venice bureau, where reporter Earle Kimel helped break the story of Atta's American squeeze.

We asked him if he had any clue about what had happened to her. Was she just a reluctant witness? Or had she been frightened into silence? Kimel knew a bit about recalcitrant witnesses; he'd found some strippers who had danced for Atta in a Sarasota strip joint, for example, but then encountered resistance from the strip joint's management when he wanted to ask them a few questions.

Their response was to throw him out of the club.

"A dancer at the Cheetah Lounge in Sarasota also reported seeing one of the alleged terrorists (Atta) at the strip club," Kimel reported. "Several other Cheetah employees, shown pictures of the men who trained in Venice, said they looked somewhat familiar ... A club manager escorted a Herald-Tribune reporter out of the club shortly afterward, saying the Cheetah had no comment."

Maybe the manager didn't want publicity. But probably he didn't want his girls to talk because he'd been 'clued-in' on the need for secrecy. Whether the strippers had knowledge about Atta was fast-becoming rhetorical.

Kimel said he had no idea where Amanda Keller was currently. He thought she'd left town, wished us luck in finding her, and with a weak smile let us know that if we did find her, he had a few questions he'd like answered, too.

Our next stop was "Fantasies & Lingerie," where Amanda had worked as a private dancer. Like Cheetah's, it's just down the street from the Sarasota Airport.

It turned out to be a locked-down facility in a run-down strip mall. No windows. One door. Locked.

The only access was though an intercom.

The manager told us to go away. He had no employees named 'Amanda.' No, he would not come out.

Next.

Kimel's second story about Atta and Amanda included a brief phone interview he'd done with her. She was speaking to him from her mother's house in the northern Florida town of Lady Lake, said the article.

"In a telephone interview late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garret Metts, because she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta," reported Kimel.

Garret Metts is, or was, the 'hot guy' Amanda met in a Sarasota nightclub while with Atta.

Kimel's account contained the eleven words, she said before lapsing into silence. "I can't really discuss anything," she told him. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."

Amanda's mother had met Atta, too. "Keller's mother, Susan Payne of Lady Lake, remembered Atta," Kimel reported.

"I didn't like him; he just seemed strange," she said.

We eventually lost count of the number of eyewitnesses who told reporters Atta 'creeped them out.'

Atta dressed in a casual yuppie fashion, said Amanda's mother.

Her daughter told her he mostly kept to himself. Amanda had taken him in because he said he had nowhere to stay, she said.

"'Stray dogs, stray cats, stray people, she was always taught to help anybody out when they needed help," Payne said.'

A real humanitarian, we're sure, concerned with children and every living thing. But since she'd also been, if only briefly, the girlfriend of a man with the blood of 3,000 innocent human beings on his hands, somebody should have been asserting the people's right to know here.

But: it's strange. Nobody did.

***

We went looking for Garret Metts, the 'studly' boyfriend for whom Amanda dumped Atta, only to discover he had been killed the previous summer in a car accident.

We visited his last known address, a modest two bedroom ranch house in South Venice. There we met Garret's younger brother, who remembered Amanda well ... When your older brother's dating a stripper with pink-to-orange to-dyed blond hair, he let us understand, you tend to pay attention.

Amanda and Atta even lived briefly, he said, with Garret's family.

We checked the neighbors, and discovered several who knew all about Amanda Keller and Mohamed Atta.

In fact, one neighbor said that the lady across the street still had Atta's dog. From her description, we recognized that she must be talking about the little dog who survived Atta's kitten-killing spree by hiding under a couch.

Garret's brother passed on the names of some of Amanda's girl friends: Olivia. Angelina. Page. They used to hang out together at a bar called Crawdad's on the Intracoastal Canal, which wends through Venice.

We were puzzled when we couldn't find Crawdad's listed in the phone book. Then we learned it had closed a year ago, and the owners had moved on to open a new place called The Big Easy.

On the chance that the clientele of Crawdad's had followed the owners to their new place, we stopped by. And although it was only late afternoon the bar was busy already, filled with a mix of prosperous-looking older men sipping whiskey, catered to by an attractive young wait staff, busy killing the hour between five and six. One young waitress, we noticed, had something shiny sticking out of her tongue ... A diamond stud.

We thought: These could be Amanda's people.

We struck up a conversation at the bar, and several beers later had made contact with a blond woman in her twenties named Laurie, who had known Amanda.

The only problem was, she didn't: want to talk about her. She gave as her reason for protecting her friend:

"Who wants to be known as a terrorists girlfriend?"

It made a certain sense. Still, privacy concerns in matters pertaining to 9/11 seem clearly outweighed in the search for the killers of 3,000 people.

So we drove up to Lady Lake, a smallish town tucked into the hill country of northern Florida. We thought we'd try to get in touch with Amanda's mother, Susan Payne. But the house had been abandoned. There was broken glass all over the driveway. Susan Payne had died months ago, a neighbor told us. Another daughter, Tammy, had moved away.

On a sweltering hot August: day that seemed to come right out of the movie "Body Heat" we visited Amanda's former residences in the Venice area. We found another house where she had lived, this one on Manasota Key, near North Port. But it too was vacant. Then, in Port Charlotte, just to the south of North Port, we pulled up to another of Amanda's former residences and got lucky ...

A man was mowing the lawn in front of the house. He knew Amanda, sure. His stepson had lived with Amanda two years ago, he said. He appeared not to have much use for either. He and his wife, the stepson's mother, were raising the stepson's two children. The stepson was something of an 'unfit parent.'

He couldn't: tell us where the stepson was, but he knew he was no longer with Amanda. The stepson's living arrangements were currently fluid.

***

We re-grouped. It was time to review what we had already learned. We re-read news accounts, and in the process discovered another story about Amanda and Atta, that had come out a week after the initial flurry of reports.

We were amazed at what it contained ... The Sarasota Herald-Tribune was reversing itself, though not through a retraction.

Amanda Keller had not lived with Mohamed Atta, the paper now reported, but with another Mohamed.

A Mohamed who had somehow previously escaped mention.

***

The headline offered a clue to the contortions somebody was going through to offer this news to the world. The paper, as we've seen, was counting the ever-increasing number of terrorists said to have passed through Venice in its headlines ...

They were up to five: 'FIFTH PILOT TRAINEE VANISHES.' "Mohammed" slept on her couch, a Venice woman says."

"Investigators have identified a fifth man of Middle Eastern descent who trained to fly in Venice, but they don't know if he was involved in the September 11 attacks because they can't find him. He told the people he lived with in Venice earlier this year that he was moving to Paris," the paper reported.

"The man, known as Mohammed, stayed at Amanda Keller's unit in the Sandpiper Apartment complex on Airport Avenue in April. Authorities would not release the man's full name, and Keller would not divulge it, citing instructions from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement."

There had been a fifth terrorist pilot in Venice, authorities were now asserting. By itself that is not too surprising; there may have been dozens.

His name was Mohammed, with an extra 'm' in the middle.

Strangely, enough, the similarities between him and the terrorist ringleader didn't end with their similar names. The two Mohameds shared a lot of characteristics ...

Like Atta -- who, as we've seen, told Amanda he was French -- this new Mohamed also had a French Connection, of sorts ... He said he was moving to Paris.

Also like Atta, this 'other Mohamed' had an 'icky' personality. "He would leer," Tammy Payne, Keller's sister, told reporters, "God was he creepy."

This other Mohamed's chief -- and apparently only -- salient characteristic seemed to be that he was not the Mohamed whose last name was Atta.

"Investigators recently asked Keller about the man because his name appeared on a list of flight students at Venice area flight schools," said the story. "They aren't sure whether he was among the 19 men who hijacked the jets that crashed into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center towers and in rural Pennsylvania. But his training in Venice and his disappearance have attracted their attention because of four other men who authorities say trained in Venice to prepare for the attacks."

So, there was a second terrorist named Mohamed in Venice. But authorities wouldn't release his full name. Amanda Keller told reporters she wouldn't either. This second Mohamed had vanished without a trace. But despite their vagueness on his identity, whereabouts, chronology, and participation in the 9/11 attack, authorities knew one thing about him to an absolute dead certainty:

He wasn't the terrorist ringleader.

It hadn't been Mohamed Atta waking up to pink hairs on his pillow in the morning ... It was this other Mohamed.

Even for a cover story, this one seemed a little thin. For an outright lie, it looked pretty bald. But --  and here's the point -- it didn't have to be fully thought out. It was for local consumption. It put to bed rumors about Mohamed Atta's American girlfriend. The local paper didn't question further.

It was the way things were in Florida after the 9/11 attack.

***

There had been some initial confusion, authorities admitted. But Amanda Keller herself was now available to clear it up.

"Keller said comments attributed to her in the Herald Tribune on Saturday, saying that Atta lived in her apartment, were wrong. She said that it was this unidentified fifth man, also named Mohamed, that stayed in her home."

"In an interview at her mother's house, Keller wouldn't talk about the man who stayed on her couch. But: she did say the attention she's received from police and the media has been unwelcome."

As a lingerie model, Amanda was probably quite capable of dealing with unwanted attention.

What to make of this Fifth Pilot Theory? We found the whole story strange.

Was it plausible that someone-actually, a half-dozen people -- had mistaken the man with the 1,000-yard stare whose picture had been seen everywhere around the world ... for someone else?

We thought a big clue was that the New York Times-owned Sarasota Herald-Tribune had pulled Earle Kimel, who'd discovered the connection, off the story.

Were there any other crucial 9/ 11 witnesses who had conspicuously changed their stories? As a matter of fact, there were. In fact, there were several striking examples right in -- where else? -- Florida.

***

Shuckum's is a dive bar in Ft. Lauderdale with the requisite nautical theme, complete with life-size shark mounted on an ocean-colored wall. Mohamed Atta and two of his henchmen were drinking heavily there six nights before the attack, reported Time, Newsweek and wire service stories reprinted worldwide.

The networks all had correspondents 'go live' from Shuckums.

FBI Agents had shown up at Shuckums just 12 hours after the attack. They showed employees -- especially manager Tony Amos and bartender Patricia Idrissi -- photos of two men.

Bartender Idrissi says FBI agents told her "they were on the plane and passed away."

"We were able to recognize both gentlemen," Amos told reporters. He identified a man in a photo bearing the name Mohamed underneath, who, along with two other men, had each consumed at least several drinks.

The guy, Mohamed, was drunk, Amos said.

The two and another man "got wasted" in his place, he said, downing "chicken wings and cranberry juice, Stolichnaya and orange juice, and Captain Morgan's spiced rum and Coke."

"Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours," remembered bartender Idrissi. "The guy, Mohamed, was drunk. They were wasted."

Idrissi said the men told her they wanted to eat but didn't like what was on the menu, so she sent them to a Chinese restaurant a few doors down. They were very rude, she said.

They didn't want to pay the bill. When asked if they could afford the $48 bar tab, Atta's face had darkened. He pulled out a thick roll. 'You think I can't pay? I'm a pilot for American Airlines. I can pay my fucking bill."'

"Atta and two of his buddies seem to have gone out for a farewell bender at a seafood bar called Shuckums," Newsweek reported.

"Atta drank five Stoli-and-fruit-juices, while one of the others drank rum and Coke. For once, Atta and his friends became agitated, shouting curse words in Arabic, reportedly including a particularly blasphemous one that roughly translates as "F-k God."

Time magazine put it this way: "It was at: Shuckums, on Sept. 8, that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi did some pre-mass murder tippling. Atta drank vodka and orange juice, while Al-Shehhi preferred rum and cokes, five drinks apiece."

One eyewitness interviewed at Shuckum's described Atta as having something more than just an eerie presence.

"He was just kind of strange, because he was just staring," the woman told Brian Ross on NBC. "And every time I'd walk in and out, he had the same look on his face, so God knows what was going through his mind. Now I guess we know what was going through his mind. He had a very intense-looking face, very intense-looking eyes."

Along with other reports of heavy drinking which were surfacing, the report was at odds with the portrait -- the official story -- that was beginning to emerge of the terrorist ringleader, raising questions about whether Atta was really a fanatic and puritanical Islamic fundamentalist? Wahhabi desert dweller -- or just a guy who knows the importance of Stoli's authentic Russian heritage when you're letting the night unfold. Were they sure he was Islamic Fundamentalist?

Maybe Atta was Islamic Stolichnaya.

Then a witness's conspicuous retraction came to the rescue of the official story. Night manager Amos changed his story. Mohamed Atta drank nothing stronger than cranberry juice that evening at Shuckum's Bar, Tony Amos now said.

He was sitting quietly by himself. It had been Atta's companion Marwan and a third man that did all the drinking.

Case closed.

Everyone by this time had seen the brooding mug shot of Mohamed Atta, complete with unnerving icy stare. Is it at all plausible that Atta could be mistaken for someone else? For the teddy bear, Marwan?

We wanted to ask Tony Amos. But when we stopped at Shuckum's we discovered that neither he nor bartender Idrissi were there any longer. No one knew where they'd gone. The current bartender, before she realized she said too much, indicated their leave-taking had been somehow 9/11 related.

Amos and Idrissi had purchased tickets to the Island of Lost Witnesses. Hopefully round trip.

***

A week later, when the Los Angeles Times mentioned the night at Shuckum's in a story on the terrorist's final days, the reports of heavy drinking were gone. The story didn't even mention it:

"That same night (Sept 7) down the coast in Florida, Atta and Al-Shehhi went to Shuckums sports bar in Hollywood along with a still unidentified third man. The owner, Tony Amos, says Atta sat quietly by himself and drank cranberry juice and played a video game, while Al-Shehhi and the other customer tossed back mixed drinks and argued."

Why did the restaurant manager change his story? We read carefully through the detailed early accounts of the incident, and were left -- as we suspect: you are -- with a startling conclusion.

The manager's retraction was coerced, because the two employees' initial remembrances of the encounter were just too full of vivid details. Amos says they had chicken wings and Stoli, Capt. Morgan's Spiced Rum and Coke. He said Mohamed was drunk, his voice was slurred. Bartender Idrissi recalls how many drinks (5) each downed, and said Atta paid her with a $100 bill from a thick wad, but left only a $3 tip.

Bartenders remember things like that.

Stories of the terrorist ringleader's two-fisted drinking habits -- we will be hearing more -- lead inevitably to doubts about an official narrative which insisted that the villains who attacked defenseless civilians and broke the hearts of Americans were cave-dwelling religious fanatics who had been cast out of their own society.

Well what if they weren't?

***

After all, its not as if the Shuckum's story was the only drinking incident, there were many. The London Sunday Mail to cite just one example, reported Atta and Al-Shehhi spent a thousand dollars in 45 minutes on Krug and Perrier-Jouet champagne at a Palm Beach bar called 251 Sunrise.

Marwan was with a short blonde, said the paper, while Atta was with a six foot tall busty brunette in her late twenties. This has the ring of truth. Sidekicks don't get to pick first. The Mail reported both of the women were known locally as "regular companions of high-rollers."

Are there Islamic fundamentalist high-rollers?

If the truth can be so easily manipulated as the incident at Shuckum's seems to show, then 'inconvenient knowledge' about the hijackers might contain information that would force a reappraisal of just who, in fact, our enemy was.

What remained were sanitized reports, like the Sept. 22 Washington Post:

"The Friday night before the attacks, Atta and two other men  -- one of them another suspected hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi  -- spent 3 1/2 hours at a sports bar in Hollywood, Fla., called Shuckums. Atta played video games, a pursuit out of line with fundamentalist beliefs. But the manager on duty that night has said that he doesn't recall seeing Atta drink alcohol."

Were we witnessing evidence of a federal 'clean-up crew' in action? Were they 'scrubbing down' Florida and sanitizing the public record of inconvenient knowledge?

We knew one thing. We still wanted to find Amanda Keller.

Because the 'Fifth Pilot' was the 'Unknown Terrorist.' His entire existence, for the record, consisted of his stay with Amanda. There were no follow-up stories about him.

No "Fifth Pilot Identified" headlines.

Even his name remained a mystery. He was Mohamed No Last Name. He went totally unmentioned in later in-depth news accounts about the Hamburg cadre's key members.

He was The Man Who Was Not There.

After serving the purpose of disabusing the public of the notion that Mohamed Atta had lived with Amanda Keller in March and April of 2001, he retired from earthly existence, was immediately forgotten, and has never been mentioned again by the press or by authorities.

Except for Amanda Keller saying so in her retraction, there was absolutely no evidence that he had ever existed at all. And yet this transparent ruse was somehow strangely successful in keeping the press from going after the story.

The part that really hurts is not so much that they take us for fools and get away with it ... It's that they might be right.

We made a new rule of thumb: "When the FBI identifies someone with only one name, don't believe anything they say."

***

And we continued to search for Amanda Keller, and finally got the break we'd been hoping for. On our third or fourth phone call to the police chief of Lady Lake seeking information on Amanda and her family, he turned us over to 'Debbie,' the department's detective in charge of juvenile and child welfare cases.

Debbie already knew quite a bit about Amanda. She had known her and her family, as well. Police had been called out to their place regularly. They had been involved in a lot of 'domestics.'

Despite being only 21, Amanda Keller had two children, Debbie stated.  She divorced from the children's father. He had had her "Baker-acted," which meant she was declared a threat to herself, and not a fit parent. There had been a court fight, the result of which was that Steve Keller, the father, won custody of the two toddlers.

Amanda had had drinking and drug problems. For that matter, so had her husband. Amanda's mother, Susan Payne died three months after September 11, sometime in December. After attending her funeral, Amanda "abducted her two children from the parent with lawful custodial care and fled the state," Debbie stated.

She took her children to a maternal aunt's house in a large Midwestern state, and turned herself in to state authorities there. Custodial arrangements were now being worked out jointly by the two states.

Amanda was working to put her life together, Debbie told us. She was sober. She was in a stable living environment. Amanda's aunt was involved. She and her husband had been two immature kids with babies, she said.

"Amanda had absolutely no parenting skills at the time, and she was from a family where there were no parenting skills."

The situation was being monitored, Debbie stated. Would we like the aunt's phone number?

We made an unsuccessful attempt to sound nonchalant.

Yes, please, we replied. That would be nice.

CHAPTER SEVEN:  MOHAMED ATTA'S SECRET WORLD

If the media had just treated Mohamed Atta like they do any other celebrity, like O.J. writ large ... If Entertainment Tonight had just taken viewers for a sneak peek backstage into the private life of one of history's greatest villains ... If Mohamed Atta had only gotten the media spotlight accorded J-Lo's latest boyfriend ... 9/11 might not remain such a near-total mystery.

The reason they didn't is simple. They couldn't. They weren't allowed to. But if they could ... If they could, reporters would still be camped out on Amanda Keller's doorstep, the way one New York Times reporter was, until the FBI ordered him to go home.

We finally found Amanda. Overall, she was not a happy camper ...

About press harassment, she said, "A New York Times reporter named Chris -- young, tall, kind of heavy, dark hair and a dark goatee -- came to my house. And he was mad because I wouldn't talk to him. But I was still reeling from Garret dying, and this dude would NOT leave me alone. I stood outside arguing with him forever, and he was trying to trip me up, get me to say something, and I said, I don't know what the hell you're trying to do," she said.

"And I called the FBI agent that had been calling me -- right while this reporter guy was standing there -- and said, this guy won't leave me alone. The FBI agent said let me talk to him, so I handed him the phone. And I don't know what was said, but after that he left me alone."

Amanda Keller may have had 'scorching-hot' details of life with a terrorist ringleader ...

But the FBI had other ideas.

***

When we met Amanda Keller, she didn't look at all like what we'd been expecting. While she and Atta lived together she was moving in pretty fast company, so we'd been expecting -- maybe not a pink-haired stripper -- but still, someone who chewed gum and had a really really short attention span.

Instead, the now 22 year-old Amanda Keller looks just like what she is today: a young mom, raising three small children and living with a man with a day job.

She was dressed in a pullover sweater and jeans, with natural light brown hair framing an attractive face. She even wore glasses, which made her blue eyes look a little watery.

In short, it was hard to visualize how she could ever have been wild enough to attract the jaded Atta's attention. Compared to what we'd heard about her, she looked positively matronly.

Only later, after she pulled out photographs taken two years ago, posing with the boyfriend for whom she'd left Atta without a backward glance, did we begin to understand what Atta must have seen in her ... a 20 year-old hottie.

She didn't look like that now. It was a composed young woman who came to our hotel to meet us. She even brought her sister.

Amanda Keller said she's suffered the same bullying harassment from the FBI that the other intimidated witnesses at the Sandpiper Apartments were forced to endure. Even after she left Venice, she said, FBI agents called her every other day for several months after the attack, just as they had with Stephanie Frederickson.

"There was a police car constantly watching the house," she said.

***

"When we burned some leaves in a burn barrel, a police officer came over and told us we weren't allowed to burn anything because we were on some FBI list, and they were afraid we might be burning documents or something."

Pretty serious surveillance for a girl who lived with some other Mohamed ... Was this why she recanted her original statement?

"Because of the intimidation by the FBI," she replied. "They told me not to talk to anybody, to keep my mouth shut. The newspaper quote was accurate: 'I can't say anything because I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."'

The FBI nearly convinced her that she didn't know who she'd been living with for two months, Amanda said. It was easier just to go along with what she was being told.

"When I saw Charlie (Grapentine) talking in the newspaper I knew they were going to jump all over him. I thought, "Charlie, no! Can't you just wait?"'

We were hearing way too many stories from eyewitnesses of FBI intimidation and harassment for it to be blamed on a few over-zealous agents, or a couple of 'bad apples.'

Something weird was going on in Southwest Florida ... Something -- dare we say it?

Something un-American.

***

Whoever Mohamed Atta ultimately turns out to have been, meeting Amanda brought us a huge step closer to the truth. Still, as we began to listen to her tell her story, we were mentally assessing the believability of what she was saying, until we had arrived at our conclusion.

We think a reader should be able to do the same. So we'll let her tell her story in her own words, as much as we can, just as she told it to us, in a three-and-a-half hour interview we filmed with her at a secret location. The only condition she set on our interview was that we not reveal where she is living today.

We agreed.

We began by asking her how she came to be in Venice in the first place. Frankly, we had wondered if she had been some kind of 'perk' of Atta's 'job.'

But the story she told was virtually identical with what we'd heard from the Lady Lake detective, featuring youthful immaturity compounded by casual drug use, along with big dollops of domestic violence. Meeting Atta was an accident.

Amanda was just 19 when she moved to Venice, but she already had two children. Her recently- divorced husband had "pulled a fast one on her," she said, and was granted custody of the kids.

In the aftermath, she felt bereft, devastated ...

Pink hair was on the horizon.

She moved to Venice with her boyfriend-of-the-moment, who was from nearby Port Charlotte. "Robert liked to move around a lot," she explained.

He also liked to beat her. While looking for a way out, she worked an assortment of jobs. At one of them, in early February, 2001, she met Mohamed Atta.

"I worked as a manager at Taco Bell and McDonalds in Port Charlotte, then got hired at Papa John's in Venice," she said. "I'd worked there for 2-3 weeks before I met Mohamed."

Atta came in with people whose names she learned later: Peter, Stephan & Juergen, none of which sound Arab, oddly enough.

Her account of meeting Atta jibes with the September 14, 2001 Charlotte Sun report: "Keller, who allegedly met Mohamed while working at Papa John's Pizza in Venice ... A Papa John's employee confirmed that Keller was a manager there, but has not been to work for some time."

Her emotional state at the time could be described as fragile.

"I was at an ultimate low, living with a guy I wasn't happy with, abusive, and missing my two kids. I wanted to figure a way out without getting hurt," she explained.

"Mohamed comes in, I'm standing there covered in dough, baseball cap, hair pulled into a pony tail, looking my ultimate worst."

"Mohamed asked one of my employees to have me come over and wait on him, and so I did ... I said can I help you?"

"Mohamed said, 'Do you know how pretty you are?' And I just looked at him kind of funny and said "Are you going to order a pizza or what?"'

"So Mohamed said, how would you like to go out for dinner. I declined, and went and made them their pizza. I can remember their pizza cause it was weird; it was like every single thing you can put on a pizza, all at one time. It was disgusting."

"After that they came back every day," she continued. "Some times a couple of times a day. And they ordered the same nasty pizza over and over again."

Many of Mohamed Atta's close associates while he was in Florida weren't Arab, apparently. They were German.

"Peter and Stephan were from Austria, Juergen was German, they had nice (German) accents, yah, yah ... Peter asked me if I had any girlfriends he could introduce me to, and at that time I didn't because Robert didn't allow me to have any friends."

"And Mohamed would tell me how pretty I was, and he compared me to a flower that was still closed up, and a bud that hadn't yet bloomed. He told me I had a natural beauty about me."

This sounds like flowery Islamic rhetoric, or maybe the words of a practiced seducer. Spies learn that sort of thing, we've heard.

"I had a cell phone," Amanda continued, "Mohamed asked for my phone number, he'd come in every day for two and a half weeks, and I gave it to him. Then he called me one day and said he'd just gotten evicted from this house he lived in with seven other guys in North Port, which I saw later when I helped him move out."

This was a major clue ... If Mohamed Atta was not in Miami in February of 2001, where the FBI says he was, but on the Gulf coast, in North Port, just south of Venice, then something was well and truly rotten in the state of Denmark ...

"He (Atta) asked me if 1 knew of another apartment he could rent," she continued. "He said he didn't care if it even had a bed as long as it had a desk. He told the lady there that too."

This matches a detail in the Charlotte Sun: "The only request Atta made to the couple, the LaConcas said, was that they provide him a desk in which he could do his aviation homework. 'He didn't even care if the house had a bed, all he wanted was a desk,' said Tony LaConca."

Atta and Amanda's doughy courtship proceeded apace, until one day she came to be with Atta when he rented from the LaConcas.

"I helped him move from a house in North Port, and he asked me to talk to the landlady, because he didn't like American women, and she (Vonnie) happened to be the one renting the apartment," Amanda said.

"'How can you like me if you don't like American women?' I asked him. 'I'm as American as it gets!"'

Mohamed replied that he didn't 'translate' well with American women.

"So I talked to the landlady for him," Amanda said. "He was curt and rude with her, so she told him when it was time to pay the rent just to stick it (the check) in the freezer, so she wouldn't have to deal with him."

At right about this time she decided to leave Robert, she says. Just days later, after her and Atta's three-day party in Key West, she agreed to get a place with Atta. She remembers the date, probably from repeating the story over and over to the FBI.

"So on February 25,2001 we went to Key West for 3 days ... It was me, Mohamed, Peter, Stephan and Linda. Linda knew the owner (of the newly-rented house) and told me she was a stripper."

Linda, who the Sun-Herald reported got a phone call from Atta during the week before the attack, is the woman later characterized as unhelpful with the FBI.

That was when we realized that Amanda Keller didn't have to be a rocket scientist to help unearth information about the terrorist conspiracy. And the first case in point is that the terrorist ringleader was about to party for three days with people whose names do not appear to be Arab.

Based on her descriptions, we will later be able to positively identify at least five of Atta's close German associates during the time he was in Florida. They were not fellow student pilots, but individuals with whom he appeared to have long-standing relationships, said Amanda, and with whom he attended 'meetings.'

Our thoughts were racing as we listened to Amanda tell the story of their Key West excursion ...

"I had a beat-up '81 Ford Granada, and he (Atta) asked me to meet him," Amanda began. "He was driving a rented white Grand Am. The place he lived in, in North Port, wasn't too far from where I was living."

"We went to Key West, and he took this long, out-of-the-way route. He was really familiar with Florida. He knew a back way to Ft. Lauderdale on the way back. He drove to Daytona Beach and Naples and Fort Myers all the time. He always rented cars out of Tampa. A red Pontiac, a green Pontiac and a white one, all Grand Ams."

"I slept most of the way, he and Linda stayed awake."

Mohamed Atta cruised towards Key West accompanied by two girls who knew how to party. Amanda remembers thinking Atta may have even met Linda before ...

"Linda instantly latched onto him, at Vonnie and Tony's, when we went to move his stuff into Vonnie's place," she explained.

"She had black hair, mid-twenties, said she was a stripper in Sarasota. Her and Mohamed acted like they knew each other." On the car ride down they acted like they were old friends. She sat in the front seat, I was in the back to stretch out because I knew I was going to end up falling asleep."

She dismisses whatever suspicions she had with a wave.

"Linda was kind of easy, sort of, just open for business. She was really clingy with me too, though. It was kind of uncomfortable."

Before reaching Key West, they rendezvoused with Atta's German friends.

"We met with Peter and Stephan, at one of the first islands before you get to Key West, Largo. They had already been on their way down. Then we stopped at a Bell's outlet on Largo, and we went crazy and bought a bunch of clothes."

The original Sept. 14, 2001 Charlotte Sun article confirms, in a backhand way, Amanda's account of a shopping spree:

"While he was writing the checks, the couple noticed Mohamed had brand new clothing, all still with tags on them from a local mall, the couple remembered."

Peter and Stephan were the two German men that Atta's North Port landlord said the girls met on the trip. "The two girls were introduced to two men from Germany that they said were Mohamed's friends, Tony LaConca told the Sun."

"I thought it was strange, because Mohamed didn't appear to be French-Canadian or German."

When the group checked into a hotel in Key West, there was also something odd about the room assignments. "We rented 3 different rooms in Key West," Amanda said.

"In one room nobody slept. It was where they put their flight bags. Then they locked the room down. Peter and Stephan slept in one room. And me, Mohamed and Linda slept in the same room."

She adds immediately, "But nothing happened, no threesomes, cause I'm not a lesbian."

Amanda may have been a 'private dancer,' but she wasn't terribly worldly otherwise. She was from a small town in North Florida, and hadn't traveled much. The free-wheeling Key West made quite an impression on her.

"It was my first time ever in Key West and I was shocked -- there were naked people everywhere! We walked out on this pier and there was this naked guy right in front of me, and I freaked."

"Mohamed said this was normal for where he was from, France, where there were nude beaches everywhere. But I looked down and I was mortified."

So Amanda did think Atta was French. In her defense, when we hear more about Atta's claimed French connections later, there are details which make her belief seem slightly-less hopelessly naive.

Another big surprise: their trip to Key West mixed business with pleasure. Atta and his German pals had a dinner meeting which Amanda said she wasn't allowed to attend.

"We went to Sloppy Joe's, went to Rick's Rooftop Bar, and took a boat ride to see the dolphins, me and Linda did, while Peter, Stephan and Mohamed went to the Hard Rock to meet some people for dinner. They just said they had to meet with some people at Hard Rock. They didn't tell me who it was."

Who was Mohamed Atta meeting in Key West? All Amanda knows is that they flew in just to meet Atta ...

"Somebody had flown in to meet with them in a single-engine plane -- to come speak to them. When they came back, they met up with us on the dock, and everybody was somber-looking and kind of quiet."

Amanda's description of their demeanor when they returned from the meeting make's it hard not to conclude that it had involved discussion of actions that would leave thousands dead.

"Later we were walking through some shops, a chapel by the sea, looking at some necklaces and Mohamed turned to me and out of the blue said, 'Why don't we get married?"'

"And I said, 'What the hell are you talking about? I just met you!"'

"And he said, 'Well this way I can have my visa and I can stay here.' Peter and Stephan started laughing, and told him, 'You're not in the right country.' And Mohamed got really mad at me."

"And I said, 'How the hell can you get mad at me for not wanting to marry you? I just met you, plus I just got out of a bad marriage.'"

"Pointing at Peter and Stephan, Linda said, 'I'm getting ready to marry one of you two."'

"So we went by Diva's, and it was the first time I ever saw a drag queen, and I was standing there talking to them. They had their pictures taken with a drag queen. Peter, Mohamed and Stephan  were all standing next to the drag queen, who stuffed his hand down all their pants in the pictures, and Peter and Stephen both laughed it off, but Mohamed got really angry," said Amanda.

The truth is always stranger than fiction. Somewhere there are photographs of terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta being groped by a drag-queen in Key West. This is startling, and not a little surreal.

But given numerous accounts of Atta's proclivities, which included frequent visits to strip clubs, it's not at all unbelievable.

"He (Atta) was mad because 1 was standing there talking to the drag queens," she continued. "So he stopped at this store, a Cuban cigar shop, and they bought big fat cigars and began smoking one which smelled really really bad."

Perhaps Atta was used to being fawned over. He had, after all, a full-time bodyguard (Marwan), acolytes, and minions. But in Key West he was forced to play second fiddle to his young blonde companion, who was clearly the center of attention. Getting a big fat Cuban Cigar must have been small compensation.

"And we walked past Sloppy Joe's and the bartender -- I was wearing a purple top that tied around my neck in three places and came down my back in a v-shape, and a khaki skirt, and chunky shoes -- and the bartender called me into the bar, saying, "Hey Blondie! Come in here! Shots are on me!"'

Blonde babes get treated different. Stop the presses. Atta would have to learn to cope. "He (the bartender) lined purple hooters down the bar, and there was a drag queen and Linda and me drinking shots with him. And Mohamed got really mad at this, and told me I shouldn't be drinking in public. And I said 'I don't know who the hell you are, you're not my father!"'

There was, already, trouble in paradise.

"This was where it first started. I was telling him, 'You're not going to run me.' But I was also trying to be nice about it, because I was looking at him (Atta) as a way to get out of my relationship with Robert," explained Amanda.

"After that we went to Rick's Rooftop bar, and I didn't see the sign cause someone was standing in front of it, but it said 'clothing optional,' and Linda and I went first and we got up there and there were just naked people standing everywhere! The one that sticks out in my mind was a woman who must have been 80 years old, dancing in nothing but a tattooed thong."

An 80 year-old woman wearing nothing but a tattooed thong is exactly what an Islamic fundamentalist would expect to find in America. If Atta minded this display of Western decadence, he kept it to himself.

Then, again, he'd probably seen it before ... Amanda says she was surprised to see how well Atta and his chums knew their way around Key West.

"We went back to the hotel, and I couldn't find my way, but the guys knew exactly where they were going, and I said, 'how did you guys remember?' And nobody answered me."

Again the next day Atta had a business appointment. But this time Amanda got to ride along.

"Next morning we went to the Key West Airport, and they pulled over at a beach nearly, and there were flight students from the airport, and Peter, Stephan and Mohamed talking with the flight students, and they introduced me, and I remember one guy said he was from Africa. They were all talking in a language I couldn't understand," she said.

An aviation executive in Venice who'd recently flown into the Key West Airport filled us in on its colorful history.

"For a long time down in Key West, the Sheriff's Department was under orders to keep all the dope sniffing dogs out of the airport," he said.

"At one time the Sheriff would even send patrol cars to escort the dope going up the road to Miami. At least they aren't doing that any more.

"But after the World Trade Center attack, it was only 4 hours before the FBI showed up at Big Pine Key. There were a bunch of Arabs on Little Pine Key," this executive said.

"They were gone three hours before the FBI got there."

***

Amanda said something which may be important about the curious hotel room that Atta rented but nobody slept in, vacant except for the men's flight bags.

"They were drinking the whole time we were there," she said. "And they were doing drugs, but not in front of me. They would go into the locked down room where no one slept, saying they needed to look at their manuals, and when they came back you could tell their jaws were locked, and they started chewing gum like there was no tomorrow."

"They didn't do drugs in front of me until after I had met everyone back at the apartment in Venice, at the Sentinel Apartments," Amanda stated. "Once I had met everyone these they felt comfortable with me and pulled out the coke."

Atta was a juiced-up Islamic fundamentalist.

Atta was coke-head Wahhabi.

We've never heard of anything like that.

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