Amerithrax (8 page)
SOMEWHERE
between the end of April and the third week of May 2001, Mohammad Atta showed up at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Homestead, Florida. A clerk ushered him into the office of Johnelle Bryant, new manager for the farm service agency. Hers was an important job— arranging or granting government-financed loans for agri- culture, real estate, and farming-type operations.
“He had very scary-looking eyes,” she told ABC News much later. “His eyes were black—so black that his iris was almost the same color as his pupil, which in itself gave him the appearance of being very, very scary. Very intense. And then—with his accent—he came across as very intimidating. How could somebody be that evil, be that close to me and I didn’t recognize it?”
At first Atta declined to speak with Bryant, saying with repugnance she was “but a female.” Though Bryant ex- plained she was the manager, he still balked at conducting business with her. Finally she said, “If you’re interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then you would need to deal with me.” Her servicing area in- cluded Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Monroe Counties. Atta reluctantly agreed. Bryant wrote his name down, spell- ing it “A-T-T-A-H.” He leaned forward and said, “No, A- T-T-A, as in ‘Atta boy!’ I’m originally from Egypt, but I’ve just moved here from Afghanistan. I left all my belongings at home to move to the U.S. to start my dream, which was to go to flight school, and get my pilot’s license and work both as a charter pilot and a crop duster.” Slow-moving, low-flying fixed-wing agricultural crop dusters were a com- mon sight over Florida fields, delivering their spray of liquid fertilizer or insecticide. The fixed-wing aircraft were built to carry large tanks of liquid chemicals.
Bryant explained that a tank of that size wouldn’t fit through the door and, although the aircraft would have a greater chemical capacity than a regular crop duster, his modifications would take up every available square inch of the interior except for where the pilot would be sitting. “You wouldn’t be able to use the same aircraft for both crop- dusting and as a charter plane,” she said. “That wouldn’t work, but it’s very creative.”
“It most certainly would work!” said Atta. “I’m an en- gineer and I know how to solve those problems. I have an engineering degree and have studied in Germany.” Atta had lived and worked in Hamburg.
The entire time Atta was in her office, his emotions kept going up and down. Bryant found him “persistent and fright- ening.” He had an unusual habit—when listening to her re- sponses to his questions, he’d press his lips together so tightly they became a straight line. When she told him the agency couldn’t finance the type of operation he was inter- ested in, Atta jumped back in his chair. He accused her of discriminating against him because he was not a citizen. She tried to “speak nicely to him,” to calm him down.
Atta had learned of her agency from a forty-dollar book he had purchased off cable TV. The book advertised how to obtain free grants or loans from the government. “Actu- ally,” said Bryant later, “we have a loan limit of $750,000 and he was asking for $650,000. He also thought that all he had to do to obtain the money was to actually just come in to my office, tell what he wanted the loan for, and obtain the cash without any kind of application processing.”
As she explained the application process to him, he be-
“He actually believed that he could walk into the office and say that he needed $650,000 to purchase an aircraft with,” said Bryant, “and that I would give him $650,000 in cash.”
Atta was obviously disappointed. When he noticed a huge, black, older model safe in her office, he asked what would prevent him from stealing all the cash inside.
“For one thing,” Bryant told him, “there’s no cash in that safe.”
“And what’s the second thing,” Atta asked, “that would prevent me from coming behind your desk, cutting your throat and making off with all the cash in the safe because you don’t have audio or visual security in your office?”
“Number one, there’s no cash in the safe. Number two, my training would prevent you from coming behind the desk and cutting my throat.”
Atta kind of stepped back and said, “So you’ve had mil- itary training?”
Bryant explained she had had about six months of karate training, in a martial art called
Koname Ru.
Atta was very surprised that a woman would have such training.
He pointed to a picture over her desk, a going-away gift to her from her former coworkers in the national office, and tried to buy it. He started throwing money on her desk. Bryant recalled, “He wanted that picture really bad—said it was a really beautiful picture of Washington, D.C., capturing all the buildings and monuments in one panoramic photo- graph.”
“It’s one of the prettiest, the best I’ve ever seen of Wash- ington,” he said. As he looked at the aerial view, he asked about the Pentagon, the Capitol, and the White House.” He picked the Pentagon out himself. He said he wanted to go to New York and visit the World Trade Center.
“It’s not for sale.”
At that he put more money from a huge wad down on her desk.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s a gift. It’s not for sale for anything.”
His face became very bitter at that point. “How would America like it,” he said, “if another country destroyed Washington, D.C., and some of the monuments in it, like the cities in my country that have been destroyed?”
At the end of their one-hour interview, Bryant turned him down for the loan because the program was intended for actual farming purposes and as a non–U.S. citizen he did not meet the basic eligibility requirements. She referred him to other government agencies and to a bank downstairs.
“Would my plans to be out of the country for a few weeks interfere with my eligibility for a loan?” Atta said, mentioning Madrid, Germany, and a third place, a country that Bryant could not remember.
Atta traveled widely. He went to Switzerland on January 4, 2000, and Germany in March. On May 30, 2000, after failing to enter the Czech Republic through Prague’s Ruzyne Airport due to inadequate documentation, Atta journeyed to the Czech Republic under his own name. He entered by bus on June 2, this time with correct papers. There he allegedly met with an Iraqi agent in a Prague transit lounge. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was a veteran spy and a crackerjack used-car dealer who operated under diplomatic cover. Atta and al-Ani did not leave the cafe and Atta took the next flight out.
In June 2000 and March 2001 Atta visited Spain and the Czech Republic. Atta’s last departure point for the U.S. be- fore 9-11 was once again Prague. On his trip to the Czech Republic on April 8, 2001, Atta stayed at the Prague Hilton and at Kutna Hora. In June 2001, the Czechs expelled al- Ani, and, after 9-11, Czech authorities denied any meetings between Atta and any Iraqi intelligence officials who may or may not have given him anthrax bacteria. Twenty days after Bob Stevens’s death, Berlin detectives began trying to find out for certain if Atta had received anthrax spores from Iraqi agents.
In April or May 2001, Atta opened a bank account at a branch of Sun Trust. On several occasions in August, he led several Mideastern men to inquire about crop-dusting at the
On July 18, 2001, he left Miami for a third visit to Spain. During his ten days there Atta rented a car and spent four days in Madrid, probably waiting for a final go-ahead.
Five years earlier, the Office of Technology Assessment had theorized that a small private plane, loaded with 220 pounds of spores, could fly over Washington, D.C., and leave an invisible mist that might kill a million unsuspecting people. They estimated release of a single warhead of an- thrax spores could kill thirty thousand to one hundred thou- sand.
Atta was only the first of four 9-11 hijackers to apply for a federal loan to finance the acquisition and modification of crop dusters. The others were Marwan al-Shehhi, Ahmed Alghamdi, and Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan al Qadi Bani- hammad.
3
Atta later returned to Bryant’s office, slightly disguised with glasses. He claimed he was an accountant for al- Shehhi, who was with him. He said he wanted five hundred thousand dollars to buy land for a sugarcane farm. Alghamdi and Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan al Qadi Banihammad came separately seeking loans. They were not as successful at dealing with people as Atta, and he had failed miserably. The rejection of their loan requests altered the hijackers’ plan, a plan they had kicked around for the last five years. The terrorists had intended to pack a twin-engine plane with explosive chemicals and convert it to a flying bomb. When Atta reported to his group he could not get funding, they switched to hijacking passenger jets. In the fall of 2000,
3
Abu Zabaydah, a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, told this to his American interrogators after his capture.
Had the strain of anthrax that killed Bob Stevens origi- nated in some Afghan cave? Since early summer 1998, Is- lamist terrorists under the command of Osama bin Laden had been actively testing chemical and bacteriological weap- ons in a well-equipped, fortified compound hidden near Qandahar. In September 1999, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Naggar, a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, confessed to Egyptian security that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an ally of bin Laden’s Qaeda network, had purchased anthrax spores from an East Asian country. The same Southeast Asian factory had al- ready supplied anthrax spores to the Indonesian-based Is- lamic Moro Front, a terror group closely associated with bin Laden. Al Qaeda was supplied the deadly bacteria by mail and without identification for $3,685, and that included ship- ping costs.
After paying $7,500 up front, Al Qaeda also bought an- thrax spores from factories in the Czech Republic and from East European and Southeast Asian labs for as little as
$10,000, again without identification. They purchased
E. coli
and
Salmonella
for $5,000 in the Czech Republic. Ad- ditional samples of deadly anthrax may have been obtained from North Korea for a smaller amount of cash.
Special chemical- and biological-agent production labs had been purchased in the former Yugoslavia in early May 1998, and shipped via Pakistan to Afghanistan, where an- thrax was a common veterinary disease. “It’s in Afghani- stan,” molecular biologist Paul S. Keim of Northern Arizona University said. “If a cow dies of anthrax it will bleed out its nose. All you have to do is scrape up a little blood, put it in a petri dish, and you have anthrax.” You can get spores from either the soil or a carcass.
Training in the use of chemical agents for Al Qaeda took place in Afghanistan. An instruction manual was recovered from the home of a Libyan Al Qaeda member in Manches- ter, England. Rabbit and dog test animals were later found near bin Laden’s Jalalabad training camps. Convicted ter-
They may have had the supervision of a few Ukrainian expert chemists and biologists. Al Qaeda training included “kits” with toxins and chemical agents. Some terrorists were being trained to grow “lethal biological cultures” using sub- stances easily available on the commercial market.
The CIA had predicted that a bioweapon attack by bin Laden was “highly likely.” Once the FBI learned that the 9-11 terrorists had a host of connections with the Boca Ra- ton area and with AMI, they began searching for anthrax residue among the terrorists’ corpses. The FBI searched the charred remains of Flight 93, which terrorists had crashed into a Pennsylvania field when the passengers rose up against them. Was there any trace of anthrax in the body of Alhaznawi, which was recovered from that crash site? They analyzed the remains of American Airlines Flight 77, which had crashed into the Pentagon. They conducted exhaustive testing for the presence of anthrax spores anywhere the hi- jackers had lived or worked or trained or died. They found none.