MOHAMED ATTA WORKED FOR ELITE U.S.—GERMAN
GOVERNMENT EXCHANGE PROGRAM
world exclusive
by Daniel Hopsicker
copyright 2003
MadCowMorningNews
may not be printed without
permission
VENICE, FL—April 24
For at least
four years while living in Hamburg during the 1990’s terrorist ringleader
Mohamed Atta was part of a 'joint venture' between the U.S. and German
Governments, the MadCowMorningNews has
learned, an elite international “exchange” program run by a little-known
private organization with close ties to powerful American political
figures like David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger.
The jointly-funded
government effort picked up the tab for Atta on sojourns in Cairo,
Istanbul, and Aleppo in Syria during the years 1994 and 1995 and employing
him as a “tutor” and “seminar participant” during 1996 and 1997.
Moreover Atta’s financial
relationship with the U.S.—German government effort, known as the may even
extend back to his initial move from Egypt to Germany in 1992, after being
“recruited” in Cairo by a mysterious German couple dubbed the “hijacker’s
sponsors” in a recent news account in the Chicago
Tribune.
In the years before he
became a ‘terrorist ringleader,’ Atta was enjoying the patronage of a
government initiative overseen by the U.S. State Department and the German
Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the German equivalent of
the U.S. Agency currently supervising the secretive bidding race for tens
of billions of dollars of post-war reconstruction contracts in Iraq, the
Agency for International Development.
All the news that fits...under the
rug
News that Mohamed Atta
had been on the payroll of an elite international program known as the
“Congress-Bundestag Program first surfaced a month after the 9/11 attack
in a brief seven-line report by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung on Oct. 18, 2001 under the headline “ATTA
WAS TUTOR FOR SCHOLARSHIP
HOLDERS.”
The story quoted a
spokesman for “Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft,” described as a “German
international further education organisation,” as having admitted paying
Hamburg cadre principal Atta as a “scholarship holder” and “tutor,” as the
spokesman put it, between 1995 and 1997.
But the shocking
revelation that Atta had therefore been on the payroll of a joint
U.S.—German government program was concealed by the newspaper, through the
simple expedient of neglecting to mention that the “Carl Duisberg
Gesellschaft” was merely a private entity set up to administer an official
U.S. and German government initiative.
The U.S. end of the
program is run out of an address at United Nations Plaza in New York by CDS International. The letters stand
for Carl Duisberg Society, which is also the name of its German
counterpart in Cologne, the
Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. Both are named for Carl Duisberg, a German
chemist and industrialist who headed the Bayer Corporation during the
1920’s.
The list of elite power
brokers backing CDS International ranges from Henry Kissinger to Bill
Clinton. Kissinger, to cite just one example, addressed over 100
international business leaders at a dinner at the River Club of New York
on June 2, 1987 organized and celebrating CDS
International.
Why Kissinger bowed out
Kissinger congratulated
CDS International on its 20 years of service in keeping close business
ties, not only between Germany and the United States, but more recently
through career development programs for participants from other countries
as well.
And during his visit to
Germany to commemorate the Berlin Airlift, then-President Bill Clinton
mentioned the CDS International Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, noting
that the United States "will be working hard to expand our support" for
the Congress-Bundestag exchange which "has already given more than 10,000
German and American students the chance to visit each other's
countries."
Were he to give the same
speech today he would no doubt change the wording to “visit and
vaporize.”
CDS International, states
the organizations literature, provides opportunities for young German
professionals. "These young German engineers earn real world experience
and are given assignments to contribute from the start,” a program
spokesman enthused in a newspaper interview.
The spokesman
neglected to mention the fact that the program’s most famous recent
graduate’s “real world experience” includes murdering almost 3000 people
in less than two hours in New York City.
The financial
relationship between the U.S. and German Governments and the terrorist
ringleader has never before been reported in the U.S. a fact which may be
due to the program’s ties to a raft of politically-powerful boosters in
the U.S., which in addition to Kissinger and Rockefeller also includes
Democratic heavyweights like former First Lady Hillary Clinton and Clinton
White House adviser Ira Magaziner.
Mysterious German
couple called 'hijacker's sponsors'
Having powerful friends
in such high places may also explain the curious omissions in a second
story about Mohamed Atta’s time in Germany which appeared recently in the
Chicago Tribune, headlined “9/11 haunts hijacker's sponsors; German couple
talks of living with pilot Atta.”
The March 7,2003 story
describes the 1992 meeting in Cairo which led Mohamed Atta to move to
Hamburg, between Atta and an German couple, which the paper does not name,
who ran an international student exchange program, which the paper also
leaves anonymous.
During a visit to the
Egyptian capital in fall 1991, said the Tribune, the German couple had
stayed with friends who knew Atta's father, a Cairo lawyer, and his
father's friends had then introduced the German couple to
Atta.
“Atta, who had recently
graduated with a degree in architectural engineering from the University
of Cairo, told the couple he wanted to study architecture in Germany, but
he had no particular idea where he should go,” the paper
reported.
Atta, though the article
neglects to mention it, had found himself with “no particular idea where
he should go” because although he had studied engineering at prestigious
Cairo University he had not fared well enough to gain admission to its
graduate school.
"In this first
conversation, we suggested he continue his studies in Hamburg and offered
him a place to live at our house," the paper quotes the German wife
telling investigators from the BKA, the German equivalent of the
FBI.
Atta, she states,
accepted their offer right away.
Why did an (unnamed)
German couple, running an (unnamed) international exchange program leap at
the chance to engage a young man who was not even considered promising
enough to gain entrance to a local Cairo graduate
school?
The Tribune doesn’t say.
"Shock & Awe' was used first against
America
After studying German in
Cairo, Atta arrived in the country on July 24, 1992, according to
investigators' records, and then lived rent-free for at least the next six
months in the couple's home in a quiet, middle-class
neighborhood.
It is more than curious
that although Tribune correspondent Stevenson Swanson cites the German
couple for “having played such an important role in Atta's move to
Germany,” he never gives their names, nor that of the organization they
worked for.
But since just two years
later Atta was on the payroll of the “Congress-Bundestag Program,” it is
reasonable to conclude that this same government-funded program was
responsible for bringing him to Germany in the first place, under the
aegis of an unnamed German couple.
Its elite sponsors are
apparently powerful enough to keep the organization’s name out of the
newspapers, or, at any rate, out of the Chicago Tribune.
When Atta returned for a
three-month visit to Cairo in 1995, the Egyptian government was in the
midst of cracking down viciously on Islamic
fundamentalists.
Yet, oddly, Atta chose
this time to grow a beard, traditionally a sign of a devout Muslim man,
but in this case also assumed to have been a defiant political gesture
chosen to register his disgust at the secular elite that ruled his
homeland.
His two German traveling
“companions” later reported that Atta told them he would not be cowed by
the country's "fat cats," who they said Atta believed were criminalizing
religious traditionalists while bowing shamefully to the West in foreign
and economic policies.
But maybe
the beard was
the gesture of a man “singing for his supper” by going undercover for “fat
cats” from another world entirely.
Naw. Couldn't be.
Could it?
Daniel Hopsicker
is the author of
Barry & 'the boys:
The
CIA, the Mob
and America's
Secret History.
about the
author
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