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

CHAPTER TEN:  23 MISSING HELICOPTERS

What the FBI is trying to hide, through the simple expedient of lying about Mohamed Atta's U.S. chronology, ironically sits in plain sight today at Charlotte County Airport.

It's the first thing Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi saw every time they drove into the Airport, after exiting Interstate 75 onto the county road running alongside.

It's an Ark. A Flying Ark.

Tied down at one corner of the Charlotte County Airport is a vintage DC-3, garishly painted to look like an airborne Noah's Ark. Hippos, giraffes and elephants adorn the silver sides of the plane, climbing towards the cockpit. The colorful oddity, the most conspicuous plane at a small rural airport, has been parked there since being seized by law enforcement two years ago.

It belonged to Frank Moss, a notorious 80's-era drug smuggler who briefly achieved a certain notoriety during the Iran Contra Hearings, after it was revealed that Oliver North knew that Contra supply planes from Moss's Hondu Carib airline were also being used for drug runs into the U.S.

North was, no doubt, shocked. But despite the unfortunate publicity, Frank Moss has apparently soldiered on, and the airborne Ark isn't even the first plane of his seized there.

That honor belongs to a DC-4 which the U.S. Customs Service was chasing off the west coast of Florida in the mid-'80's, while it was busily dumping what authorities drily noted "appeared to be a load of drugs."

When it landed at Charlotte County Airport on March 16, 1987, it was seized by the DEA. An address book found aboard contained the Virginia telephone number of Robert Owen, Oliver North's courier. In a memo to North, Owens said that Moss's "DC-6 which is being used for runs [to supply the Contras] out of New Orleans is probably used for drug runs into the US."

Moss had been under investigation for narcotics offenses since 1979, it turned out, by no less than ten different law enforcement agencies. But America is the land of the second chance, and thus Moss was one of the first pilots chosen to fly Contra supply missions. He was there at the inception of the "contra cocaine" business run with the tacit approval of shadowy government figures like then-CIA Director Bill Casey.

Moss also regularly dropped duffel bags -- military issue, natch-filled with contra cocaine onto the Louisiana 'farm' of Barry Seal, the biggest drug smuggler in American history, according to the U.S. Government. Besides being big in the drug business, Seal was a life-long CIA operative, something which quickly became 'inconvenient knowledge' during Iran Contra and, later, the Clinton scandals, where the Wall Street Journal called him the "ghost haunting Whitewater."

Both Charlotte County Airport, and Venice 40 miles to the north were unlikely hotbeds of covert activity, and it is no doubt just an other 'freak coincidence' that Barry Seal's Iran Contra buddies have their fingerprints all over operations at two tiny airports frequented by the terrorists. Still, Atta had hung out in both places ...

What was up with that?

Late one afternoon we met with two County law enforcement officials in the area. They told us that the somnolent west coast of Florida has been teeming with activity of a turbulently spookish kind for as long as some in local law enforcement can recall.

"You know, of course, that there is at least a 40-year history of covert training in this area," the older official stated. "They used Useppa Island just off-shore to train for the Bay of Pigs." Actually, we hadn't known.

"The only city in Charlotte County, Punta Gorda, was pretty much founded by a group of 'former' CIA agents," said the second official, a little wearily, we thought. "They built Punta Gorda Isles, a big upscale development on Charlotte Bay."

How much strange activity went on at the Charlotte County Airport where Atta and Marwan trained and spent time?

Well, for starters the airport is currently home, the officials told us, to major intrigue involving the disappearance of at least 23 helicopters ... from the County Sheriff's Department.

The helicopters had been procured through a General Services Administration Military Surplus program, and then spirited out of the country, to exotic and faraway destinations where the Charlotte County Sheriff has no apparent law enforcement jurisdiction.

"Right now the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office has a flyable helicopter in Chile," the current Sheriff told us mournfully. "But we can't get it back. We've had absolutely no cooperation from the feds."

The program under which the Charlotte County Sheriff's Department procured their helicopters is the same one that resulted in felony convictions of 'former' CIA agents in Arizona in the Forest Service C-130 scandal in the mid-90's. There a C-130 military cargo plane loaned to the U.S. Forest Service to fight wildfires in the West also went missing ...

When it was discovered, on a runway at the Mexico City Airport, there was a billion dollars worth of cocaine aboard.

So it's not as if local law enforcement doesn't have a pretty good idea of who's been swiping helicopters in Charlotte County, we were informed. But knowing it and being able to do anything about it are apparently two different things.

The helicopters were 'misplaced' over a period of three years, said the Sheriff, beginning in 1996. The thieves had pretty ecumenical tastes ...

"We've lost all kinds: Hueys, Bell Jet Rangers, Hughes 500 helicopters. When we discovered it we took it immediately to the State's Attorney. They locked up the local force captain. But the FAA has never prosecuted anybody, and they show zero interest in helping us get our copters back."

"You wouldn't think Charlotte County would need 23 helicopters," laughed Coy Jacob, an aviation business owner at the Venice Airport. "They'd be bumping into each other in the air."

"Charlotte County has always had kind of a shadow," he explained. "There's a fellow who rebuilds helicopters who has always been in quasi-problems with the FAA with his helicopter parts. Jamie Hill."

Jamie Hill had been a target of the Charlotte County Sheriff investigation, we'd learned. "He's got seven helicopters sitting on his property today that don't belong to him," one local law enforcement source stated. "He's got millions of dollars of aircraft parts with the numbers filed out. "

Jamie Hill's partner in the company strongly suspected of having been a conduit for the disappearance of 23 helicopters from the County Sheriff's Air Wing turns out to be another notorious covert operative with a significant presence at the Charlotte County Airport. Dietrich Reinhardt's name, which could have been lifted straight out of transcripts of the Iran Contra Hearings, had also been linked with Barry Seal's infamous Mena, Arkansas cocaine smuggling.

We discovered that one of Reinhardt's companies active at the Charlotte County Airport, Caribe Air, had been doing business with Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation.

Caribe Air was an especially notorious CIA proprietary whose past included 'blemishes' like having all its aircraft seized at Mena, Arkansas after government prosecutors accused the company of using its planes to transport cocaine worth billions of dollars into the U.S.

It was beginning to feel like Old Home Week in Charlotte County. Reinhardt -- apparently not content with the distinction of being business partners with a man suspected of making helicopters disappear -- was linked to the man who trained both pilots who crashed airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Dekkers had had a 'maintenance contract' with Reinhardt's company. This is no doubt just another freak coincidence.

Why would Dietrich Reinhardt know Rudi Dekkers? What would they have to talk about? Maybe Dekkers' 'maintenance contract' involved vacuuming out the planes.

You wouldn't want to trust that kind of job to just anybody.

***

Reinhardt had also operated the now-defunct St. Lucia Airways, referred to as a CIA proprietary company in a Senate intelligence committee report. Reports in The Washington Post linked St. Lucia planes to the delivery of Hawk and TOW missiles to Tehran, Iran in 1985 and 1986 as part the covert arms-for-hostages deal between the United States and Iran.

But busy guys like Dietrich are hard to get on the phone. The Post reported, "Attempts to reach Reinhardt by telephone in Frankfurt, Germany, were unsuccessful. His telephone had been disconnected."

Was Dietrich Reinhardt German?

Reinhardt's St. Lucia flew a C-130 military cargo plane often seen delivering arms to a remote airstrip in Zaire in 1986. The New York Times reported the weapons were on their way to Angolan rebels. But Reinhardt denied any involvement in arms shipments to Angola, saying the cargo was relief goods for Zaire.

Zaire is one of the African countries said to have been involved in blood diamonds, supposedly a bin Laden organization specialty.

Is it just coincidence that the Florida airports where Mohamed Atta spent the most time are both linked to American covert operations? We remembered a question we'd asked in a conversation we'd had just a week after the attack with a gentleman who was 'sort of retired' after spending 35 years working for something 'very much like' the CIA.

Nine days after the attack, we told him, we'd read reports saying that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the far-flung network of terrorist pilots and thugs got their money from the same source.

We were incredulous at this news, and asked, "How could the Agency not have known about 15 foreign pilots all paid from one source?"

He answered carefully, speaking to us kindly, the way you would to a child not terribly bright.

"I would assume that they did know," he told us. "It would be almost impossible for them not to."

Of course. They must have. They must have looked "the other way," just as somebody -- the previous Sheriff -- had to have been looking the other way while 'somebody' slipped away with 23 helicopters. He had to have known what has happening. Helicopters make noise taking off.

We had begun to discover that local law enforcement officials in South West Florida weren't stupid, or unobservant. But there was a limit to their powers, especially when faced with federal operations.

When we interviewed the former Venice Chief of Police, for example, he seemed a little embarrassed, even apologetic, about what he had been forced to allow at the airport in his town. He asked that we not judge city officials too harshly. They had little or no control over what went on at the Airport, which was a federal jurisdiction.

"The Venice Airport is the kind of place where it's not unusual to see a military Blackhawk helicopter touch down at three in the morning and then take off again 30 seconds later," said the Chief, shrugging. "Or the airport can be quiet and deserted one minute, and the next have 5,000 paratroopers landing. That's just the way it is here."

What we discovered at Atta's home port in January and February of 2001, the Charlotte County Airport, was shocking, and where our investigation was headed was beginning to become plain.

One of the most disturbing moments of our time in South West Florida came when we sat down with two local law enforcement officials who could be considered fairly typical Southern Sheriffs, both of whom ventured the opinion that -- based on what they had witnessed of a 40-year long history of CIA-connected covert operations in their area -- they believed that the CIA was somehow involved in, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.

We expect talk like that from wild-eyed 'conspiracy theorists,' but not law enforcement officials, who say they've spent their careers watching questionable activities with which they could not interfere.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the FBI has been as silent as Mullah Omar about the milieu which Atta and his Hamburg cadre slipped into as smoothly as a harem girl into pajamas. And it wasn't just these two S.W. Florida locations, we soon hear; instead, the entire stretch of coastline from Naples in the south to Sarasota in the north on close examination looks like some kind of international pirate's domain, filled with men flying the jolly roger.

We were alarmed at how many of the people in Florida's 'cowboy flyboy' world that the terrorist ringleader moved in had also been shadow players in a spook-filled world, whose lives and careers seemed to be bound up in an awful lot of America's recent secret history.

Were they bound up with Mohamed Atta's as well?

CHAPTER ELEVEN:  'SAUDI PRINCE' MOHAMED ATTA?

To pierce the veil of the official story about the terrorist conspiracy and arrive at something better resembling the truth required a little understanding about what it is that spies do. They do a lot of things, but one of the things they do, before going out to do those things they do, is to create for themselves a 'legend,' a cover story. A lie that holds together long enough to let them slip away.

Saying spies create legends is just a polite way of saying that they lie. Habitually, regularly, reflexively and for a living. It is a craft. They are professionals. They do it well.

This creates a bit of a problem for us civilians. No one likes to think of themselves as someone who can be successfully lied to. A sucker. But we all can, and we all have been. So it's important that we admit the possibility that when it comes to Mohamed Atra, as the Firesign Theater put it memorably, "Everything you know is wrong."

The government's explanation of Atta as a 'fanatic Islamic fundamentalist' was, as we've seen, fraying at the edges. So just for a moment we're going to assume that we've been successfully lied to about Arta, and put aside everything we've been told. We're going to pretend Mohamed Atta wasn't the wild-eyed religious zealot we've been told he is, and see if that clears up any of the many 'anomalies' about the official explanation of who he was.

What if, instead of a xenophobic Islamic fundamentalist, Mohamed Atta had been a Prince. A Saudi Prince. If that idea makes you feel you've slipped down the rabbit hole, don't worry.

You've got company.

Before we'd finished tracking down people who we discovered had been close to the terrorist ringleader in the U.S., we'd been continuously amazed at the sheer rich pageantry of corruption, criminal activity and deviant behavior they exhibited ...

Busy with everything from smuggling aircraft into the U.S. over the Arctic to sabotaging planes and helicopters to crash. We met ex-KGB Colonels in Miami working for the Russian Mob; heard about a Saudi Prince and his entourage at loose ends at an Air Force base near Pensacola while a helicopter that President Roosevelt gave his father, King Faisal, was repaired; we learned of wineries in South Africa owned by members of the family of the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, and million dollar 'loans' to televangelist Jerry Falwell that he'd forgotten to repay. Bugged phones, double agents, a mysterious Pakistani with State Department connections flying daily to Havana, and an ex-CIA pilot who used to fly U-2s over Russia ...

Atta's U.S. associates were responsible for or involved in a Lear jet seized in Orlando by Uzi- toting DEA agents with 43 lbs. of heroin onboard with it's pilot talking unconcernedly on his cell phone while agents leveled their guns; suspected skullduggery in the Mormon Temple in Orlando; a gold mine in the Caribbean; high technology smuggling out of southwest Florida; missionary flights to Havana carrying -- not the word of God -- but bag-fulls of gold Rolexes for sympathetic Cuban officials who already had Bibles; the interesting part-time job of the chief pilot for Venezuela's Air Force One; robot planes at the Venice Airport; and a "really tall blond woman whose parents were KGB."

***

For somebody looking to go unrecognized, Atta knew a lot of people. Far from being the secretive ringleader of a 'lone cadre' which slipped through Europe and America unnoticed, Atta moved in some pretty interesting circles.

Compared to some of the bizarre lives we will soon be witnessing, the idea of Atta as a Saudi Prince doesn't seem too over the top. There is even evidence that he may have been using it as one of his cover stories, or legends.

Atta's flight instructor at Huffman Aviation told another student pilot, Dr. Anne Greaves, an English osteopath, that Mohamed Atta had connections with the Saudi Royal Family, and that Atta's status as a member of the Saudi elite warranted him having a full-time bodyguard (Marwan) with him at all times in the U.S.

The revelation was buried in the news right after 9/11. It resurfaced later in an Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative program, "4 Corners," a Down Under 60 Minutes.

Anne Greaves lifelong passion for aviation led her into pursuing her dream of learning to fly at Huffman Aviation. She was there at the same time as Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were there.

"When I checked with my instructor on one occasion about their (strange) habits," she told 4 Corners, "I was informed that the men we now know as Mohamed Atta and Al-Shehhi actually had royal connections with a Saudi House and that Al-Shehhi was his bodyguard."

Australian TV correspondent Liz Jackson attempted to pin down details: "This story about Mohamed Atta being royalty and Al-Shehhi being his bodyguard, was that something just that Huffman's told you? I mean do you think that was something that they even believed or ..."

"It was my impression that it was generally believed," Greaves said. "Because it was my instructor who told me this at the time so I had the impression that, that was generally believed, yes."

"That Mohamed Atta was royalty?"

"That he had some connection of the Royal House of Saudi, yes."

"And Al-Shehhi was his bodyguard?"

"That is what I was given to understand. So in a way it made sense to me that there were always two because I never saw Al- Shehhi take the controls of the aircraft. It was always Mohamed Atta but nevertheless Al-Shehhi always accompanied him on his flying lessons."

This is amazing testimony from an eye-witness with no visible ax to grind. If a student pilot at the school had had a bodyguard flying with him at all times during flight training, this detail could not have been missed by the school's owner.

The show's host asked Rudi Dekkers, "Now there have been stories that he presented himself as an Arab prince, is that correct?"

"Well, no," Dekkers replied. "If he was a prince, yes or no, I can't state that because we never heard them talking about that, we never heard anything, we have heard that one of my students who was here in the same time that Atta and Al-Shehhi was here, and I think it was Miss Greaves, that she stated in the London newspaper that he was a prince, that their clothing was expensive and that Al-Shehhi was his guard."

"Nothing of that we have seen here in the five months they were here," continued Dekkers. "They were absolutely low profile, they clothed themselves like we all do. They were just there in jeans, sneakers, regular American."

'Jeans, sneakers. Regular American.'

It sounded nice. But it wasn't true. Numerous witnesses said otherwise, like Bob Gaff, a Huffman flight instructor, who told reporters in interviews the day after the attack what a sharp dresser Atta was.

"You see how we're all dressed?" asked Gaff, who was clad in a T-shirt and jeans. "This guy used to show up in leather shoes, shined shoes, dress slacks, silk shirts, all the time."

But neither said, 'Jeans, sneakers. Regular American.'

Brad Warrick, who rented three cars to Atta during the last six weeks before the attack, told us, "Mohamed dressed to the nines. You know, nice. Nice pants and shirt. Just business like. Nice clothes, business like. He carried a briefcase."

***

'Jeans, sneakers. Regular American.' It doesn't even sound like Dekkers is talking about the same guy.

A restaurant owner in Nokomis who had a memorable encounter with Atta and his terrorist compatriots, described in a later chapter, was asked how Atta had been dressed when he came into her restaurant.

"They were dressed in Florida type shirts, the silk, you know, with the pattern, that kind of thing, lots of jewelry. Lots of jewelry. I thought they were Mafia," said Rene Adorna of the Pelican Alley.

All of these descriptions are a long way from "jeans, sneakers, regular American." It's a small point, but telling. Did Dekkers lie in an improvised on-camera attempt to discredit Anne Greaves' account? It raises a red flag about his veracity during his innumerable television appearances in the wake of the disaster.

Another comment by flight student Greaves seems clearly prescient in light of what we would soon discover.

"I just thought it very strange that two Arabs had selected an airfield or a flying establishment that was really very quietly situated," she said.

"I remember thinking at the time I found this very strange, because normally royalty learn at military establishments for security reasons alone."

Atta had learned at U.S. military facilities, we discovered. As many as seven of the hijackers were in this country at the invitation of the U.S. Government. Keeping this knowledge secret has been an objective of the cover-up currently in progress.

On the Saturday following the Tuesday attack, the Los Angeles Times broke the story in a long article on their front page ...

"A defense official said two of the hijackers were former Saudi fighter pilots," reported the paper, "who had studied in exchange programs at the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama."

The story went wide the next day, Sunday, September 15th. Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald all reported as many as seven of the terrorist hijackers in the September 11th attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations.

Two of 19 suspects named by the FBI, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi, have the same names as men listed at a housing facility for foreign military trainees at Pensacola. Two others, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, have names similar to individuals listed in public records as using the same address inside the base," the Washington Post reported.

"In addition, a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, while men with the same names as two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, appear as graduates of the U.S. International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, respectively," the Post said.

According to the Post, seven of the suspected hijackers had been in the U.S .receiving military training. Newsweek said U.S. military officials gave the FBI information suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990's at secure U.S. military installations. Three of them listed their address on driver licenses and car registrations as an address on the base of the Pensacola Naval Air Station which houses foreign-military flight trainees.

"Pentagon spokesman, Colonel Ken McClellan, said a man named Mohamed Atta had once attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama," reported USA Today.

Mohamed Atta attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. An Islamic fundamentalist learning snappy salutes in the Officer's Club?

This is a huge chunk of inconvenient knowledge. There were going to be a lot of questions. Someone was going to have to answer ... for a lot.

"But Atta is a fairly common surname in the Middle East," the Post quoted Laila Alquatami of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimnation Committee as saying, and the suspected hijacker's first name is "probably the No.1 name that is given to babies, in honor of the prophet Mohamed."

The Boston Globe reported the Pentagon's denial: "Some of the FBI suspects had names similar to those used by foreign alumni of U.S. military courses," said the Air Force in a statement. 'Discrepancies in their biographical data ... indicate we are probably not talking about the same people."'

How easy was it to tell the Pentagon was lying? Think about it. It is neither plausible nor logical that the reports were false because of seven separate cases of mistaken identity. One or two, maybe. But seven? No way.

Still, after this vague and perfunctory Pentagon denial, the story had an exceedingly short half-life. The Pentagon denied it. The media dropped it. It went away. There was no follow-up.

Had the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, Newsweek, the Miami Herald all been wrong?

None of the papers offered a retraction.

How could a story as major as this -- that many of the terrorists, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, had been in the U.S. to receive training at U.S. military facilities -- have gotten lost?

It wasn't lost, we discovered. And it wasn't wrong, either ...

It was suppressed.

***

The first thing we noticed in the Pentagon denial was that "probably not talking about the same people" doesn't strike quite the right tone of specificity one might expect of an investigation into people responsible for vaporizing 3,000 human beings.

It's not just vague. Given the circumstances, it's almost criminally vague.

When the Pentagon unveiled their big new bunker-busting bomb in Afghanistan, they didn't describe it as being a "kinda big" bomb, did they? No, they called it a "satellite-guided, two con bunker-busting bomb known as the EGBU-27."

Yet now Air Force spokesmen were persuading Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Knight Ridder newspapers to drop an immensely important revelation on the basis of statements like "name matches may not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers."

What if Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler had been able to wave Woodward and Bernstein off as the Watergate scandal came to light, by saying the burglars 'probably didn't have' White House ties?

The only answer we could see was that the initial press reports, while true, were also inconvenient, and were deliberately suppressed. Could America's vaunted free press be involved in an ongoing cover-up of something of this magnitude? We tried to find out. But we were stonewalled every step of the way.

We weren't the only ones being stonewalled. When Newsweek reported that three of the hijackers received training at the Pensacola Naval Station in Florida, home state Senator Bill Nelson fired off a fax to his friend, Attorney General John Ashcroft, demanding to know if it were true.

The Senator has still not received a reply, we heard from his spokesman, when we called his office eleven months later.

"In the wake of those reports, we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department," stated the Senator's press spokesman.

"So we asked the FBI for an answer 'if and when' they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult."

"Speaking for Senator Nelson," concluded the spokesman, "we still do not know if three of the terrorists trained at one time in Pensacola or not."

From the spokesman's somewhat wry tone, we understood that he didn't expect Attorney General Ashcroft to respond to Senator Nelson's request until hell freezes over and Ashcroft skated down from Heaven to test the ice.

If a home state Senator couldn't get a response, there was little chance we could. Still, we called the Pentagon and spoke to a Major in the Air Force's Public Affairs Office who had been involved, she said, in crafting and disseminating the original Pentagon denial to the press.

She was the Public Information Officer who read the Air Force denial to the media, so she was familiar with the question, she told us, and she offered to help us achieve clarity.

"Biographically, they're not the same people," she explained patiently, using the same language contained in the Air Force's press release. "Some of the ages are twenty years off."

'Some' of the ages?' Could she be, perhaps, just a little more precise?

Negative.

Let's make this real simple, we said. We were only asking about one of the seven purported terrorists reported to have received military training in the U.S.

Mohamed Atta.

Was she saying that the age of the 'Mohamed Atta' who had attended the Air Force's International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different than that of 'terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta?'

Not exactly, she admitted. She could not confirm that -- in this specific instance -- they had different ages. What she could do was once again deny that the International Officer's School attendee named Mohamed Atta had been the Mohamed Atta who piloted a passenger plane into the World Trade Center.

However, she could offer no specifics for her assertion, and repeatedly declined requests for biographical details about the Mohamed Atta who had trained at Maxwell Air Force Base. None of this kept her from shamelessly soldiering on.

"Mohamed is a very common name," she said.

It was indeed, we told her, making one final effort. We said we would be happy to help the Pentagon's investigative effort, especially since they were busy with other concerns. We offered to take it upon ourselves to track down the Mohamed Atta who had attended the Air Force's International Officer's School to confirm, once and for all, that he was not the Mohamed Atta said to have flown a jetliner into the side of a skyscraper in Manhattan.

All she had to do was tell us where the Mohamed Atta who had at tended International Officer's School at Maxwell AFB was from.

We would take it from there. Solve the mystery at no cost.

"I don't think you're going to get that information," the spokeswoman stated flatly.

Still, we pressed her again, and probably to the point of rudeness, to provide a few lonely specifics, and we were rewarded when she finally said, in exasperation: "I do not have the authority to tell you who (which terrorists) attended which schools."

It was hard to read this as anything other than a back-handed confirmation. When she said that she didn't have the authority, the clear implication was that someone else does ... Somewhere in the Defense Dept. a list exists with the names of Sept. 11 terrorists who received training at U.S. military facilities.

She just didn't have the authority to release it. End of story.

One obvious reason for this cover-up would be sparing the Pentagon the embarrassment of having to admit that some of the terrorists -- including ringleader Atta himself -- had only been in the U.S. to begin with to receive U.S. military training. But this may not be the most important consideration, which is why we've placed the story of Atta as Saudi Prince alongside reports that the terrorists received military training at secure U.S. bases.

Anyone receiving training in U.S. military programs, we learned, would not fit the portrait of a fanatical Islamic fundamentalist that's been painted of Mohamed Atta.

Gaining admittance to the International Officer's School at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery would have required Atta to be extremely well-connected with a friendly Arab government.

We learned just how well-connected and well-placed foreign nationals who attend International Officer's School are after finding the resume of Colonel and Staff Pilot Mohammed Ahmed Hamel Al Qubaisi, an International Officer's School graduate from the United Arab Emirates, posted on the Internet.

Currently, his resume stated, he was a Defense Military Naval & Air Attache at the United Arab Emirates embassy in Washington, after serving stints in his country's Embassy & Security Division as Chief of Intelligence, and in the UAE's Security Division/Air Force Intelligence & Security Directorate as Security Officer.

It's safe to say that Mr. Al Qubaisi is pretty dialed-in in the UAE, and the furthermost thing from a terrorist. He's a member of the Arab elite. It even looks like he's a spook.

So was Mohamed Atta.

And because he was, we're in a whole different ballgame than the one they've been announcing from high overhead in the Pentagon booth.

We heard from someone who works on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, the former wife of a CIA pilot. "I have a girlfriend who recognized Mohamed Atta. She met him at a party at the Officer's Club," she told us.

"The reason she swears it was him here is because she didn't just meet him and say hello. After she met him she went around and introduced him to the people that were with her. So she knows it was him."

Saudis were a highly visible presence at Maxwell Air Force Base, she said. "There were a lot of them living in an upscale complex in Montgomery. They had to get all of them out of here."

"They were all gone the day after the attack."

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