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

CHAPTER TWELVE:  THE SAUDI COVER

Within minutes after Mohamed Atta's name was identified as W the main suspect in the 9/11 attack, reporters began digging through newspaper archives for anything that might have been printed about him in the past.

What turned up was reflected in a question on the morning after the attack that Jane Clayson of the CBS Early Show asked of Rudi Dekkers, the Huffman Aviation co-owner then in the midst of his whirlwind round of media appearances ...

"Let me ask you this," Clayson began. "One of these men is widely considered to be responsible for a bus bombing in-in Israel. How was it that they could gain access-admittance to your school?"

Authorities immediately denied that the Mohamed Atta who masterminded the demolition of the World Trade Center was the same Mohamed Atta who, fifteen years earlier, had blown up an Israeli bus. There were two separate Arab terrorists named Mohamed Atta, they said, one who bombed a bus in 1986, and a second who flew a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center Towers.

We found a May 21, 1987 story from Damascus on the Chinese Xinhua Overseas News Service with a headline reading "SYRIA ACCUSES U.S. OF DETERIORATING BILATERAL RELATIONS."

"Abu Nidal, head of the Fatah revolutionary committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization threatened to sabotage American interests allover the world if Washington decided to hand over Mohamed Atta, a Palestinian arrested in New York, to the Israeli authorities on trial for murdering a bus driver in Israel."

The context was a recently announced U.S. decision not to send back its ambassador to Damascus unless Syria's Hafez Assad took steps first to prove that his government was no longer supporting terrorism. "American accusations of Syrian support for terrorism were baseless," declared the Xinhua report.

La plus ca change.

'Future terrorist ringleader' Atta was eighteen at the time of the bus bombing-an age when youthful idealism is often perverted into violence-but a quick search through newspaper indexes revealed that 'bus bomber Mohamed Atta,' also known as 'Mahmoud Atta,' was indeed much older, thirty- three in '86. He'd be fiftyish today.

"Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, 33, charged in the firebombing of a crowded bus on Israel's occupied West Bank on April 12, 1986, that killed one civilian and injured three others, was held Thursday without bail until the policy issues can be addressed," UPI reported on May 8, 1987.

That seemed to settle the question: Bus bomber Atta is a much older man than the terrorist hijacker.

Smoke. No fire. It happens.

By pursuing the story we'd gained a little incidental knowledge: "Mahmoud" is another was of saying "Mohamed," the same way men named 'John' are sometimes called 'Jack.'

Interestingly, 'bus bomber Atta' felt there was some confusion as to his identity: "Atta, also known as Mahmoud El Abed Ahmad, claims he is not the' person authorities were looking for," UPI reported.

So at a minimum we have two Arab radicals with the same admittedly not-uncommon name. Probably just coincidence... unless the name "Mohamed Atta" was used by numbers of Arab terrorists.

'Bus bomber Atta's globe-trotting ways were also eerily similar to 'terrorist hijacker Atta's peripatetic movements. Newspaper accounts said the bus bomber fled from Israel to Athens, and then on to Venezuela, where he was arrested. When he arrived at JFK Airport, after flying from Caracas 'accompanied' by FBI agents, the U.S. Prosecutor in the case said Atta's passport showed "numerous trips around the globe."

Terrorist pilot Atta got around a lot too. Prague, Madrid, Miami, Manhattan. Maybe being a spy hasn't changed that much.

But there's something big and important to understanding 9/11 here. Because there had been a 'Bus bomber Mohamed Atta,' the name " Mohamed Atta" was on a special CIA -FBI federal watch list, which should have red-flagged the terrorist ringleader to authorities on numerous occasions.

In fact, an NBC report the day after the attack attributed the FBI's quick zeroing in on Atta to the simple fact that they already knew who he was. They'd seen his name before, linked, said NBC's Kerry Sanders, to the bus bombing in Israel.

"Agents were in Hollywood, Florida serving search warrants inside an apartment complex," Sanders reported. "They left with several boxes of evidence. The attention was really focusing on one person, Mohamed Atta, 33 years old, somebody who they know, because they've seen his name before, linked to a bombing of a bus in Israel in 1986."

"Atta, 33, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, was listed as a suspect in a bus bombing in Israel in 1986. That landed him on a CIA-FBI-Immigration & Naturalization Service watch list," reported NBC's Sanders.

Here's the Big Question. If the name "Mohamed Atta" was on a federal watch list of people tied to terrorist activity because of 'bus-bomber Atta,' why didn't this fact get 'hijacker Atta's' ass caught before the attack?

Were they that incompetent? NBC anchor Brian Williams-he of the oft-remarked unnatural tan --  gave voice to it first, the night after the attack. "There will be many people asking tonight," he said, right over the public airwaves, "just what it is we are getting for all those tens of billions of dollars being spent on intelligence."

Could that be it? Simple incompetence? Why didn't they catch Atta if he was running in and out of the country with a notorious name? They had ample opportunity. For example, the terrorist ringleader had had police on his tail late on the night of April 26 in Broward County, Florida. Red and blue flashing lights and a police siren beckoned him to pull over. Atta pulled his red Grand Am to the curb, and was arrested during the traffic stop for not having a driving license, but he easily bailed out and drove away.

Street cops aren't looking for international terrorists during routine traffic stops. Not before 9/11, they weren't, anyway.

But what explains the fact that Atta was able to fly from Miami to Madrid and back, with no hassles ... despite the fact that he had overstayed his visa.

"At least one of the Boston hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was able to enter the United States despite having been implicated in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel, according to federal sources," the Boston Globe reported three days after the attack.

Officials said Atta's name was on a federal watch list. Yet the INS readmitted him with no problem upon his return to the U.S. Simple incompetence? Or something more sinister ...

"In interviews with the Globe yesterday, flight instructors in Florida said that it was common for 'students with Saudi affiliations' to enter the United States with only cursory background checks, and sometimes none."

Ah-ha. Gotcha. Students with 'Saudi affiliations.' This was new, or new to us: students with Saudi affiliations were accorded special treatment in Florida, said flight instructors there, that allowed them to enter and leave the U.S. more easily.

Saudis were getting special treatment in Florida from our government. That much seemed clear, even though we weren't sure we had a working definition yet of what 'special treatment' meant. And it wasn't just Saudis who got special treatment, reported the Globe, but students with "Saudi affiliations" as well. Saudis had a lot of juice in Florida.

Chuck Clapper, owner of an air charter company in Lantana, Florida, told the Globe that several Florida flying schools had contracts with Saudi Arabian Airlines that enabled them to bypass much of the red tape involved in obtaining visas for their students.

Saudi Arabia had authority to 'pass through' anyone they wanted. They didn't even need to be Saudi. They just needed 'Saudi affiliations.'

"The Saudi cover may have enabled one of the dead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, to deflect attention from the fact that he was wanted in Israel in connection with a bus bombing in 1986," the paper reported.

'The Saudi Cover.' It sounded like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel. Because he had 'Saudi cover' Atta got special treatment in Florida. Atta's passing himself off as a Saudi Prince made more sense.

Indeed, the benefit of having 'Saudi Cover' goes back some time. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC News Night: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants."

"People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington... to the Inspector General and to Diplomatic Security, and I was ignored. What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists-recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden-to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then-Soviets."

'Forced to give visas to terrorists' sounds like a good headline. Too bad we'll never see it. It pretty much capsulates American diplomat Springman's story. Was it a method still in use to bring Saudi- affiliated individuals into the U.S. when Atta arrived?

When Atta arrived a dozen years later, were 'special people' still getting in and out of the U.S. this way?

In passing, it should be noted that the 'Atta was a bus bomber' story was also twisted and used in some pretty sophisticated disin formation, when a broadly-based e-mail campaign started fingering 'tar baby' Bill Clinton for being responsible for releasing Mohamed Atta from jail.

The Oslo agreement between the Palestinians and Israel had required release of so-called "political prisoners," explained the disinfo. However, the Israelis would not release any with "blood on their hands."

That's where that dastardly Clinton comes in. As American President he supposedly "insisted" that all prisoners be released, even those with 'blood on their hands.' Some people thought it sounded like our Bill. At any rate Atta was freed, and came back to thank the U.S. by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade Center.

There was not a shred of truth to the story. But it obviously  took someone some little time and effort to first package the lie so cleverly, and then disseminate it widely, during a confusing and uncertain moment in our national life when news accounts actually said that U.S. intelligence agencies were recruiting psychics to help predict future attacks. (The FBI and CIA refused to comment, except to confirm investigators had been told to "think outside the box.")

The national mood was dicey. Enough to warrant the Washington Post to gushingly report that the FBI, "after decades of pursuing gangsters and drug kingpins to great acclaim, was rush~ ing to remake itself as the nation's primary line of defense against terrorism."

'Great acclaim' was a little rich. 'Decades of great acclaim' is rich enough to give the flack who wrote it gout. The only 'acclaim' for the FBI we'd heard came from those who want to see it abolished for a long and sordid history distinguished by scandal, incompetence, and worse.

Sometimes much worse. Remember? "Atta, 33, an Egyptian, was on the FBI's master list of suspected Arab terrorists, specifically as a possible operative of bin Laden, " reported the Sept. 13, 2001 London Daily Telegraph.

"Federal authorities have known for at least three years that two associates of bin Laden had trained in the United States as airline pilots," reported the Boston Globe, citing an FBI memo dated May 18, 1998.

The Globe doesn't say why the FBI did nothing about it. Neither does the memo, we'll wager. Not since the days of J. Edgar Hoover and Efram Zimbalist Jr. have the American people believed much in this particular Federal institution. Congress has rumbled with murmurs that it is beyond reform and should be abolished.

All of which makes it all the more puzzling when the FBI turned up so Johnny-on-the-spot at Huffman on the day of the attack. After spending decades not being able to find their ass in the dark with both hands, the beleaguered FBI shows up at Huffman Aviation in Venice less than eighteen hours after the attack. It usually takes them that long to have lunch.

This is one of the most remarkable facts about 9/11 -- remarkable in the sense that it should receive close scrutiny. It looks like the FBI already knew who he was, as well as where he was, or would have been, if he hadn't vaporized himself and thousands of others. They had known who Atta was.

Here's a newsflash: The FBI got to Venice a lot sooner than has been reported. Instead of piling out of cars during the middle of the night 18 hours after the attack, they had Huffman Aviation employees in Venice under surveillance just a few hours later. A former Huffman Aviation manager told of a car filled with FBI agents pulling up and parking right outside his house during the middle of the afternoon on the day of the attack.

"They ( the FBI) were outside my house four hours after the attack," this still-shaken aviation professional stated. Like many eyewitnesses we spoke with, this longtime aviation executive spoke of being intimidated and harassed by FBI agents. They didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut.

We've heard about this already from other people, too, haven't we? Its becoming a refrain. Hide the children honey, here comes the guy in Florsheim shoes bouncing a sap off his thigh again.

***

My phones have been bugged, they still are," the former Huffman executive said. "I thought these guys (Atta & Co.) were double agents. Why is that so incriminating?"

'Double agents.'

He'd said it. We had wondered as much ourselves. He said no more, except to indicate that he has lived in some fear for his life since the 9/11 attack, which is why he'd be very obliged if we didn't use his name.

"I gleaned early on that the operation I was working for had government protection," the Huffman executive stated. "They (the terrorists) were let into this country. How did the FBI get here so soon? Ask yourself: How'd they got here so soon?"

Let into this country? By whom? To do what?

Later we learned of a conversation this former Huffman executive -- who was at the school the whole time Atta was -- had with another aviation executive at the Venice Airport, who had asked him: Why'd he quit working for Rudi?

His response was a little frightening. "I had to leave and get out" said the former Huffman exec. "I wish I didn't know as much as I know. I told them they had nothing to fear from me. I had a contract to get paid and expected them to pay me."

Asked why he stopped cooperating with our Venice investigation -- he stopped talking to us after just a few conversations -- he said, "I've got a family to worry about."

The aviation executive he was talking to operates a maintenance facility right next door to Huffman. So he was naturally curious. What was going on at Huffman that made it so difficult to talk about now?

"You don't want to know," replied Dekker's former manager. "I've got a family, you've got a family. My wife doesn't want to know any of this stuff and if you're smart, you'll do the same."

Whoa, now! We haven't heard any voices like that on Larry King Live! At the time of this conversation we'd been poking around in Venice for a year. It wasn't long enough to have figured things out much, but it was apparently long enough to have warranted mention at the Airport.

"He made it crystal clear that Hopsicker knows far more than he thought he knew," the second aviation exec told us. "He said, 'I know more about Wally (Hilliard) than I want to know. But I can't talk to Hopsicker any more. I can't do that to my family."'

***

Maybe this is why, or partly: "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," headlined the Washington Post on September 23, 2001. "The FBI has been aware that four or five groups linked to Osama bin Laden have operated in the United States, and known for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States," the paper reported.

"Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony."

"A senior government official acknowledged to the Post that law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools," the paper said. "However, the official said there was no information to indicate the flight students had been planning suicide hijacking attacks."

Here's a more important question: if the FBI knew that a dozen Al Qaeda terrorists were attending U.S. flight schools, why didn't they do anything about it?

'The Saudi cover?' The explanation was growing increasingly plausible. Saudis had been running loose in Florida, we will soon hear, privileged and protected. Some make it sound as if somebody sold the Sunshine State to the Saudis.

From Amanda Keller, we learned that even if Atta wasn't a Saudi Prince, he had a big Saudi connection. They were having an argument about religion one day, she said. Provoked by a comment that Islamic customs like stoning were barbaric, Atta extolled some of the virtues of Islamic life as he saw it.

"Mohamed said, 'You American people are so stupid. You think you're so great and powerful, but you wouldn't even know if something was happening."'

"I said, 'Please. You people are over there killing each other for no damn good reason," Amanda told us. "What makes you think you're so fucking great? What are you fighting over? Its just ignorant.'"

"And he got mad at me, because I told him ignorance wasn't bliss. I said, 'You treat your women like shit.' And he said that's how women were meant to be treated. And I'm like, 'oh really?"

Even as she talked we thought: We would have paid to watch this scene play out.

"He would make fun of how we believe in God," she stated. "He said 'What do you people do for your god? You don't do anything for him.'"

"And I just looked at him. He was talking to me about how American women are free to choose abortions if they want, like that was immoral, and I said, 'You guys stone people to death if they get pregnant and they're not married.' I said, you want to talk about barbaric? Tha'ts barbaric. Stoning somebody to death, what does that accomplish? You guys are so damn crooked that you would stab your brother in the back and not think anything about it."'

'He said, 'You don't know what you're talking about,"' she continued. Atta told her there were many rich people who funded what he did.

"He said that there was someone in Florida -- some rich Arab -- who had a lot of money. He said, are you aware that when we come over here, your people pay to have us set up businesses?"'

"Eventually, he told me, his people were going to try to take over this country. He said, 'I've been in this country many times before. I can come in and go out of America and no one ever knows."'

This is a side of Atta we haven't seen before. Arrogant, but with a reason. He's not an infidel. He's styling. He's got 'Saudi Cover.'

Atta wasn't the only one in Venice with Saudi Cover.'

He had 'friends' at Huffman who were covered too. Saudi links to the owners of Huffman Aviation began to be uncovered shortly after the attack, in a story in the Tampa Tribune about bin Laden family members in the U .S. flying out of the country while all other aviation except military traffic had been grounded.

"The twin-engine Lear jet streaked into the afternoon sky, leaving Tampa behind but revealing a glimpse of international intrigue in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on America," the paper reported. "The federal government says the flight never took place. But the two armed bodyguards hired to chaperon their clients out of the state recall the 100-minute trip Sept. 13 quite vividly."

The paper's headline was "Phantom Flight from Florida," maybe because the federal government says the flight never took place. It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation's defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, where other Saudi princes had been purchasing racehorses in Bluegrass Country. From there, they flew a private 747 out of the country.

A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration's regional office in Atlanta told reporters, "It's not in our logs ... it didn't occur."

No one in the government would acknowledge to the Tampa Tribune what had happened. The White House referred questions on the trip to the State Department, which denied involvement, the paper reported, and the National Security Council, which did not return messages.

But two armed bodyguards hired to get their clients out of the state remembered the trip vividly: Dan Grossi, a retired Tampa cop who had worked in internal affairs and homicide, and Manuel Perez, a retired FBI agent involved in counter-terrorism. The men also provide security for the National Football League at Raymond James Stadium.

'They said it was happening," Grossi told the Tribune "This was out of a Tom Clancy movie."

Grossi said he was told that clearance for the flight came from the White House after the Prince's family pulled a favor from former President Bush.

Grossi and Perez recalled the strange feeling of flying in the near-empty sky, knowing of the ban on private flights. "My first reaction to the pilot was, 'We're not going to get shot down are we?'" Perez said.

The enforcement of the empty skies directive was so stringent that even after the United Network for Organ Sharing sought and gained FAA clearance to use charter aircraft on September 12 for critical deliveries of organs for transplant, one of its flights carrying a human heart was still forced to land in Bellingham, Washington.

But apparently the Saudis all got home okay, so that's some relief.

***

The Tampa Tribune report offered tantalizing glimpses of privilege accorded Saudi nationals denied to American citizens.

We figured the evacuation of the Saudis to have been accomplished through the CIA, and tried to track down the owner of the Lear in question. Since the plane took off from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa, we contacted them first.

Raytheon is a major defense-intelligence industry player which spent the past decade expanding, purchasing notorious E-Systems and then merging with Hughes Electronics' defense operations (Hughes Aircraft).

When we asked who had owned the Lear that took off from their facility that morning, we learned that Catch-22 is still alive and well. Raytheon said we would have to ask the owner of the plane to tell Raytheon they could tell us who owned the plane.

"I checked our policy on disclosing owner/customer information and we decline to do so unless that owner requests that we release the information," a Raytheon spokesman told us with a faint smirk.

Since we didn't know who the owner was, how could we first ask them for permission to release their names?

Later a knowledgeable aviation source told us that the Lear jet in question had come from a Naples, Florida charter service.

"Wally Hilliard owns the only charter Lear service in southwest Florida," said the source. "If a Lear was flying that day, it would have been his."

Hilliard of course is the financier who purchased Huffman Aviation for Rudi Dekkers, and it had been the terrorist's American beachhead. So not only had Hilliard financed the operation which trained Mohamed Atta and assorted other members of his terrorist cadre to fly, but he apparently also owned a Lear jet used to extricate Saudis from the Raytheon facility in Tampa.

Tampa, of course, is also home to the Pentagon's Central Command (CentCom). It was the place from which the war in Afghanistan was run.

"Everyone's got deals with the Saudis," protested a retired Special Forces Commander at McDill AFB pressed back into service for the Afghan war, when we brought the Lear flight up to him.

"Why point a finger at this one incident?"

***

The FBI pointedly stated -- early on -- that they knew about terrorists rotating through flight schools like Rudi Dekkers' in Venice, Florida. But they always left hanging the question of why they did nothing about it. Why so reticent?

***

Was there a covert operation being run by another branch of the government that was using the Venice flight schools as a 'portal' into a military training network that didn't check I.D.'s real hard?

Was that why the FBI left the operation alone?

A longtime Florida observer told us bluntly that what we were dealing with was "market forces." It was the climate of intrigue created by the commodities that were being traded on Florida's overactive black market that created conditions which allowed Arabs from desert kingdoms to wander around the state as easily as if they'd been listening to Tom Petty albums all their lives.

What commodities? What black market? What had been going on that we were missing down in Venice, Florida?

As they say in TV-Land, "Let's take a closer look".

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:  "EVIL IN OUR OWN BACKYARD"

On the morning of September 12, 2001, a small unexceptional town tucked into an out of the way corner on the off the beaten path Gulf Coast of Florida awoke to find itself the center of the world's attention.

Reporters arrived in waves at the tiny Venice Airport after the identity of the terrorist pilots from the World Trade Center attack and their relationship with the local flight school became known.

NBC's Kerry Sanders' report was typical: "Thirty-three-year-old Mohamed Atta, on the flight manifest of one of the suicide flights, one of those who the FBI suspects took the controls of the hijacked jet. Where did he learn to fly? Venice, Florida."

Venice, Florida where answers to some of the most important questions about what had happened were sketched-in, at least in pencil, combining to form what would rapidly become the government's official explanation for the attack.

We want to revisit a few of the key moments of that 'morning after' which helped shape our perceptions. But instead of the dumbfounded shock through which we initially watched what happened that day, this time we're fortified with some hard-won knowledge.

We've all had time now to deal with the shock. The plain fact was that, like most people, we had never seen anything so horrific as what we saw on September 11th. Our critical faculties had been swept away by it. There were too many poignant details filling our hearts which none will ever forget. Nor should we.

Like the chilling phone call from a flight attendant aboard American Airlines Flight 11 detailing the frantic struggle on the doomed plane as hijackers slit a passenger's throat and stormed the cockpit. Madeline Amy Sweeney's last words to her ground manager in Boston were to tell try to tell him where the hijacked plane seemed to be headed: "I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!"

Or the stark terror faced by hundreds of men and women stranded a thousand feet in the air above a raging inferno burning on the floors below them: They had two choices, die in the fire or jump into the void and plummet for nine seconds before hitting concrete.

There was no Door Number Three.

The scenes of chaos and terror in New York were coming to us live. Those people leaping out hand-in-hand. That woman's dress billowing as she fell. A bare-chested man tumbling end over end.

Awful things were happening -- live -- that human beings should never have to witness, much less endure. We felt it deep. Chaos had been loosed upon the world. Upon our world.

Bodies littered the plaza, but we didn't see any of that until later on. Arriving at the scene, the chief of police and the Mayor saw a pair of feet in their shoes laying unattached to a body. The head of a middle-aged man went rolling down the street. A woman was sliced in half by a large sheet of glass falling out of the Towers.

Then came the stories, like Jeremy Glick's, who called his wife to tell her to lead a full life, that were almost ineffably sad.

The wisest words we heard came from New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, asked in a news conference to estimate how many lives had been lost.

It was too early to know, he told reporters. He said, "The number of casualties will be more than most of us can bear."

He was right.

***

It was in this state of shock and mourning that most of us first heard and let uncritically wash over us explanations for who had committed this unspeakable crime.

But now, with the passage of time, we can take a more clearheaded look at some of what was happening in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The FBI first went to Huffman Aviation at 2:30 Wednesday morning. Sue DeSantis, the office manager, let them into the darkened flight school. They returned at 11 a.m., seized files, and carted away at least eight boxes of records.

On television, Rudi Dekkers was everywhere being interviewed. What the designated hitter is to baseball, Dekkers was to sound bites about the terrorists who had been living among us.

Dekkers was the designated "interview-EE."

At Huffman Aviation the parking lot quickly filled with satellite news trucks from all the major networks. Reporters from all the major newspapers and news magazines were hanging out in the lobby. Some were watching the story unfold on the TV in the reception area; others were standing outside smoking and trying to chat up employees.

Everyone was there to talk to Rudi Dekkers. He was on the Today Show, ABC's Good Morning America, the CBS Early Show, the Dan Rather CBS Evening News, Larry King Live, CNN LIVE with Greta Van Sustern, Peter Jennings on ABC World News 7Onight. He even entered Bill O'Reilly's No Spin Zone.

Rudi was doing a lot of fast talking, a talent which local news papers had already noted he possessed. Waiting for interviews, reporters exchanged ironic side-bar items so bizarre you knew they were true. One of Flight 11 hijackers left a Koran in a strip club in Daytona Beach. The coffee shop at Huffman Aviation gave its entrees aviation-related names. The bacon cheeseburger was known as the "Emergency Descent."

While Al Gore and George W Bush had been fiercely contesting an election allover the state in the biggest news story of the previous year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been buzzing up and down the coast of that same state in Cessnas.

Who knew?

Standing under the glare of TV lights on the apron of the Venice Airport the day after the attack, Rudi Dekkers told us what he knew. Or at least he seemed to ... in retrospect, as we'll see, it looks as if he may have been making up big chunks of it up as he went along.

Over and over, Dekkers denied any responsibility for the terrorists being in our midst. "They came in through the front door," he told reporters. He said they claimed to be Mghans who had entered this country from Germany.

"They were normal students and worked very hard. They lived nearby and bicycled here every day," said Dekkers.

At 46, Rudi Dekkers was a round, middle-aged, unprepossessing and slightly florid man who nonetheless spoke and answered questions with what one reporter noted was a "clipped Dutch accent and a tone that suggests he's used to barking out orders."

If a global network had assisted the development of the terrorist conspiracy which led to the operation, Rudi Dekkers would be the first place to look. Both before and after the attack, an unexplained element of intrigue was swirling around him.

Yet Dekkers seemed free with advice, both to law enforcement and Congress, about preventing future attacks. He had saved the day, he said, when those slackers at the FBI were about to leave his flight school without all of the pertinent records.

"It was yesterday, 2:30 a.m. they called my managers here in Venice and wanted the C-2 files," he explained on CBS. " I came in at 7 :00 in the morning, they were still there, I talked briefly with them. They told me they were ready to go. I told them that we had more customers, clients from the Middle East and I thought it was a good idea to gave them all my files. So I gave them a couple of hundred files from the last years."

One of his staffers set up a press conference in what looked like a classroom. Some rolled their eyes at the idea that this man was holding a news conference, wrote one reporter who was there. There was talk that Dekkers was a media hound. As it turns out, the talk was correct.

"I asked him why he was doing so many interviews," his office manager Sue DeSantis told us months later. "Rudi said because it was the best free advertising we would ever get. "

Mr. Dekkers was, apparently, not one to waste time on remorse when there was a buck to be made.

The beefy Dekkers was at times a little difficult to understand. He spoke defensively through a thick European accent, but his defensiveness was easier to understand than his accent. Who wouldn't be defensive in such an intense media spotlight over such a numbingly horrific event?

Yet, and this is important, despite all his 'face time,' his testimony was surprisingly devoid of revelations or insights. We didn't learn much, except that he didn't like Atta.

"If you see the picture in the newspaper, you see the face, tell me what you think," he said. "I just didn't like the face. I have no explanation."

He did, however, sort of like the chubby one. "The other guy," said Dekkers, referring to Al- Shehhi, "was the teddy bear. He was friendly. I have found out, in my life, that chubby guys are always a little bit more friendly."

The day after witnessing 3,000 vaporized bodies, Rudi Dekkers holding forth on Larry King on his theory about the jolly nature of chubby guys seemed more than just a little beside the point.

But, they let him get away with it.

Dekkers insisted to all who would listen that, where the terrorists were concerned, he was filled with an unspeakably murderous rage:

"This morning at 7:00 I heard what happened, and the first thing I questioned myself was, if I would have known, I would kill them with my own bare hands. If I have a Muslim coming in right now I think I'm going to be a human being and tell them get the hell out of my property here."

In another interview he said, "We feel awful that we had these awful men, no, these monsters, in this school. If I saw them now, I would want to murder them, kill them, like every other American at this moment."

His reassurances may have had a purpose. Tensions were running high.

About 3 p.m., officers from the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office and the Venice Police Department arrived at Huffman Aviation, saying they were looking for a suspicious blue Toyota that reportedly was on the premises.

"I hope they're not going to plant a bomb here, if they're really here," said an employee behind the desk who did not want to give his name.

Several minutes later, the law enforcement officials left the building, saying there was no danger. The vehicle had belonged to a Brazilian news crew.

"A couple of people called and said, 'How could you do this?"' explained Greg Woods, a flight instructor at Huffman. "Emotions are very high. "

Earlier that day, the Venice Gondolier ran a huge black headline across the top of the paper: "Evil in Our Back Yard." Underneath was a picture of Rudi Dekkers facing a phalanx of TV cameras, speaking into a forest of microphones.

The irony of the juxtaposition did not go unnoticed.

"At first everyone just thought it was kind of funny," said a family member of a Huffman employee, "because it made Dekkers look like he was the 'evil' in our backyard, which the newspaper probably didn't mean."

"Ad then it hit me that he'd started his flight school not long before those two terrorists moved into town. And it gave me the chills."

Less than 24 hours after the Sept. 11 attack, Rudi Dekkers, whose school will eventually be shown to have trained a veritable squadron of terrorist pilots, seemed impervious to suspicion.

What suspicion? He was schmoozing with the King himself on Larry King Live.

"Were they of a nationality other than American?" King asked.

"No, they were-my people took copies of their passports when they came in, because they need to show a I.D. And, apparently, they were -- one of them was an Afghanistan. I don't know what the other one was," replied Dekkers.

"I don't see the files myself because I have my managers taking care of that. I have spoken with one of them in several occasions. And Mr. Atta, I spoke to him one time five minutes."

Larry King showed why he is famous for never preparing for an interview, asking Dekkers, "That's Mohammed Atta, right?"

"Mohamed Atta, that's correct."

Hard-hitting American journalism is the envy of the Free World.

Larry King's sign-off with Dekkers was love and kisses:

"Rudi, thank you," King murmurs. "I know how tough this must be for you."

Tough for the rest of us maybe. Not tough for Dekkers. CBS's Jane Clayson on the CBS Morning News asked him: "And I know it is difficult, because you in some sense feel a little bit of responsibility, don't you?"

"No, we don't feel responsible for what happened at all," Dekkers replied. "No. Not nothing."

He was just running a business. There was a mercantilist approach to much of what he said.

"I don't need anything from you, just a check to start flying."

He likened flying lessons to shopping for groceries.

"We're just a business."

The stream of Middle Eastern men who walked up to his counter, thrust out cash money -- ten thousand dollars at a time -- what did we expect him to do? Not take it?

It had not registered on him as a source for concern. All he did was take their money, and then teach them to fly.

But he didn't teach them to fly into anything.

Most took his point.  But for Dekkers' school, at a tiny airport located on a former military installation, the connection to terrorists Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi prompted troublesome questions about his operations.

Dekkers said his school was typical of what existed in Florida and the rest of the United States. For years, he said, flight schools have been advertising on the lucrative foreign market. More than two- thirds of Huffman's students were from overseas. He owned another flight school further south in Naples, Florida, that also catered to foreigners. In a wire service report three days after the WTC disaster, Dekkers was quoted saying, "I can tell you that there's definitely some flaws in the system."

Later we would realize it had been one of his few truthful statements.

"The day that all this occurred, we felt very, very sad like all the other Americans," he said, on the CBS Morning News.

Expressions of sympathy are clearly in order. But Dekkers isn't American, he's Dutch.

His flight school offered instruction in light single-engine aircraft, he said. But not in commercial jetliners. He insisted the terrorist pilots couldn't have learned to hit skyscrapers with 757's merely from enrolling in his school.

He had followed the law. He repeatedly stated the terrorist pilots -- Atta and Marwan -- were people who basically walked in off the street into his school at the Venice Airport.

Dan Rather, the only newsman in Dealey Plaza during the Kennedy Assassination, didn't see anything then and not much has changed. Rather asked Dekkers, "Is this unusual for someone to come from Afghanistan or, for that matter, anyplace overseas, show up at the door and say, 'OK, I'll pay you the $10,000. Train me to fly.' Is that unusual?"

"If-if we call that 2 or 3 percent of the business is that way and it's unusual, yes," Dekkers replied. "But there are numerous students who are not happy with the flight school where they are and they just are already in the United States and they go to another flight school where they're happy. They told us they were flying in -- in another area where they were not happy and they wanted to change flight schools."

There had been 'another flight school.'

***

Federal investigators returned to Venice Municipal Airport late the day after the attack and combed through records at the Florida Flight Training Center, owned by Arne Kruithof.

Like Dekker's, Kruithof was a Dutch national. His doors were closed while federal investigators, who declined to say what they were looking for, worked inside.

A sign on the door read: "Due to a national emergency, we will be closed until further notice."

Kruithof said he couldn't talk about the federal investigation that had shined a spotlight on the small airport and the two Dutch-owned flight schools. "All our records were sacrificed yesterday (Wednesday) as part of that investigation. I can't release any information about what was taken."

In all, 27 terrorists were trained to fly, the LA Times reported. Among the four hundred foreign nationals who rotated through Dekkers' two flight schools -the second down the road in Na ples -- an as yet undisclosed number had been terrorists. While the number remained undisclosed in the months ahead it was nonetheless slowly growing.

There was no speculation in the media, however, about why young men with a pronounced weakness for lingerie models and strippers had chosen a sleepy enclave filled with widows with blue hair, so far from the pleasures of infidel flesh.

Take this pop quiz. Multiple choice. You've only got a year to live. Would you go move to Leisure World? Or head to Vegas?

While Dekkers insisted the terrorist pilots had only the most fleeting of associations with his flight school, and hotly denied being anything other than a victimized businessman, questions remained. There were over 200 flight schools, just in Florida alone.

Yet somehow the hijackers leaned towards one or the other of the two schools in Venice. The twin Venice flight schools were the terrorist's American beachhead. Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation was the terrorist's Omaha Beach. What had made these two schools so popular with the terrorist cadre?

No one asked.

The only investigation being conducted pointed a finger directly at an obscure outfit most had never even heard of called Al Qaeda, The Base.

While the FBI was, presumably, actively looking for any international networks that might have assisted the terrorists, were any likely suspects overlooked? Maybe even protected from scrutiny? Maybe the FBI should have taken a peek closer to home.

Because it did not seem like the FBI was looking too deeply or too hard. We interviewed numerous material eyewitnesses with important information who were never contacted by the FBI, which supposedly fielded 400 agents in Florida until the anthrax attack changed their focus.

"The FBI came down almost immediately after September 11," said Huffman office manager Sue DeSantis, the employee who let the FBI into the school at 2.30 in the morning. She later told us. "It just totally amazed me that they took everything Rudi said as the truth."

Could the FBI be, somehow, institutionally incurious? Or maybe they didn't need to investigate Rudi Dekkers because they already knew who he was.

Danielle Clarke was the office manager at Ambassador Aviation in Naples. "The first thing I noticed on Sept. 11 when I walked into Ambassador was they had all these TV's on, one big one in reception, and another in the student room, and they had never been on before," she told us.

Clarke said she noticed something strange about the way the FBI agent who was there talked to Rudi. "I could hear them in the other office. The FBI agent was coaching Rudi on what to tell the reporters outside."

For some reason, a lack of enthusiasm permeated the FBI's investigation of Rudi Dekkers, the man who ran the FBO (fixed base operation) at the tiny airport as well as the flight school.

Forty years ago, the Bureau displayed a similar lack of enthusiasm in investigating another man who ran an FBO, CIA agent David Ferrie in New Orleans.

A researcher called to say that Dekkers sounded phony to her when she'd seen him on TV.

"The single biggest weak link in the current case is Rudi Dekkers of Huffman Aviation in Venice Florida, just minutes away from where the President was when the attack occurred," she wrote. "He's the guy that trained the pilots. Look at his corporate records, they're on file -- 0n the Net even. Look at his links to companies that claim they're leasing 757's and 767's from an airline that doesn't own any. Look at how many businesses he's involved with. Look at who flies in and out of the airport where he operates. Find out why he hasn't filed his required annual reports with the Florida Secretary of State's office listing his officers."

We found it bizarre that no one in the media questioned Dekkers publicly about what role he may have played, or what he may have done to facilitate what happened on September 11.

If the FBI was buying his explanations, however, it wasn't on account of his sterling reputation.

Two weeks before the World Trade Center attack, Nicole Antini, an employee of Dekkers, filed suit to enforce settlement of a sexual harassment suit against him. "I tolerated Rudi's advances because I needed to keep my job," said the former Dekkers' employee in court documents.

"As long as I have worked at Huffman Aviation, I have been subjected to sexual harassment by Rudi Dekkers," she stated.

Court documents revealed that this wasn't just garden variety sexual harassment. No inadvertent touch or misunderstood word. The employee was eighteen. Her employer, Rudi Dekkers, had apparently gotten a thrill from sticking broom handles up the back of her dress when she wasn't looking. Several months later, he would be invited to testify before the Congress of the United States of America on preventing future terrorist attacks.

We still find this odd.

Amanda Keller knew Rudi Dekkers. "I saw Rudi Dekkers. He's a total pervert. A nasty, nasty man," she told us.

"He said to me one time, 'What would it take for me to have a piece of you?"'

"I looked at him and said, 'You're lucky I don't hit you.' and his secretary applauded me. He told her to sit down and shut up."

So Dekkers wasn't being shielded from serious scrutiny because he sang loud in church. What, then? Why was Rudi Dekkers protected? And by whom? Flight school owners don't have juice  like that.

Where did he get his stroke?

Rudi Dekkers was covered, we discovered, by the same umbrella his flight student Mohamed Atta huddled under. Rudi was a grateful beneficiary of 'Saudi Cover.'

While Dekkers had been minimizing his involvement with the terrorists in front of reporters in Venice the day after the attack, across the state in Vero Beach, CNN reported, FBI agents were searching houses occupied by Saudi pilots they found suspicious who said they were on a 15-month pilot's course at Huffman Aviation.

News accounts reported the same thing. One said, "Some of the kamikaze pilots had pilot licenses that indicated they were sponsored or employed by Saudi Arabian Airlines, which is owned by the Saudi government."

Not a single reporter pressed Dekkers on his Saudi connections, He got a pass.

The story of his cozy Saudi relations doesn't end there. It goes right to the bin Laden family itself.

By three weeks after the attack, people were standing clear of Rudi Dekkers on the tarmac at the Venice Airport. Former associates pled ignorance. Key employees declined comment, saying they were "no longer with the company."

Late at night in Venice, when it got really quiet, you could almost hear the mournful sound of people whistling past the graveyard. Some seemed already to be constructing a defense. Venice Airport Manager Larry Heath told reporters the city's relations with Huffman hadn't been the same since Dekkers took over, as if he weren't one of the city officials responsible for approving his presence at the Airport.

Airport Manager Heath allowed that the revelations about Venice's connection to the terrorist attacks were "absolutely amazing."

He said: "I hope it doesn't give us a black eye."

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