Free Amerithrax by Robert Graysmith

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
    Belle Glade State Municipal Airport, about an hour north- west of Fort Lauderdale. Atta and Zacarias Moussaoui (sus- pected to have been slated to be the twentieth highjacker) collected all the information about crop-dusting aircraft they could. “How much fuel and chemicals could the plane carry?” Atta asked of an Air Tractor AT-503. Were the ter- rorists researching a means to deliver biological or chemical weapons over Florida by air?
    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.
    hijackers who had been learning to fly small planes switched to simulator training in the large jets they would fly into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But even a few days before 9-11 Atta was still asking about crop dusters.
    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.