Independent investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein has been examining the shadowy history of a possible pre-9/11 meeting in Prague between lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi official Ahmad al-Ani.
To sort out the confusion, I met earlier this month in Prague with Jiri Ruzek, chief at the time of the Czech counterintelligence service, BIS. Mr. Ruzek is in a position to know what happened. He personally oversaw the investigation of Iraq's alleged covert activities that began, with full American collaboration, nearly two years before Mr. Bush became president and resulted, some five months before the 9/11 attack, in the expulsion of Ahmad al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence officer alleged to have met with Atta....
Soon after he arrived in March 1999, [al-Ani] was picked up by U.S. countersurveillance cameras. The interest in him intensified after the BIS learned from its penetration of the embassy that he was attempting to acquire explosives and contact foreign-based Arabs. Then, on April 9, 2001, the BIS's source in the embassy reported that al-Ani had gotten into a car with an unknown foreign Arab. After the car managed to elude BIS surveillance, concern mounted that he was in the process of recruiting his bomber, and, since the BIS could not find the mystery Arab, Mr. Ruzek decided to act pre-emptively. He recommended to Foreign Minister Kavan that al-Ani be immediately expelled from the Czech Republic. He was given 48 hours to get out of Prague on April 19--and he returned to Baghdad.
On Sept. 11, Mohamed Atta's picture was shown on Czech television, and the next day the BIS's source in the Iraqi Embassy dropped a bombshell. He told his BIS case officer that he recognized Atta as the Arab who got in the car with al-Ani on April 9. Mr. Ruzek immediately relayed the secret information to Washington through the CIA liaison. The FBI sent an interrogation team to Prague, which, after questioning and testing the source, concluded that there was a 70% likelihood that he was not intentionally lying and sincerely believed that he saw Atta with al-Ani. The issue remained whether he had mistaken someone who resembled Atta for the 9/11 hijacker. Meanwhile, records were found showing that Atta had applied for a Czech visa in Germany in 2000, and made at least one previous trip to Prague (from Bonn, by bus, on June 2, 2000, flying to Newark, N.J., the next day).
Less than a week after Mr. Ruzek shared the BIS's confidential information with American intelligence, it was leaked.
Mohamed Atta's been investigated thoroughly. Where was he during this time?
The FBI... established that Atta checked out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach and cashed a check for $8,000 from a SunTrust account on April 4, 2001, and was seen again in Florida on April 11, 2001. But it could not account for his movements during this period (or how he used that money), though there was no record of Atta using his passport to travel outside the U.S.
Where is al-Ani now? Why, he's in custody in Iraq.
Al-Ani was captured by the CIA in Baghdad in 2003, and he remains in detention in Iraq. Though no one has been allowed to interview him, he told the CIA that he was not anywhere near Prague at the time of the meeting. Although Mr. Ruzek termed al-Ani's claim of being elsewhere "pure nonsense," the CIA had evidently found it could go no further with the vexing case.
Normal people would think that the CIA would move swiftly to resolve such a critical question: a possible direct link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the 9/11 plotters. Has al-Ani even been interrogated? We just don't know (yet). But a lot of vested interests would benefit from his continued silence. And Mohamed Atta ain't talking.
Related:
• Edward Jay Epstein - web site