Atta/Prague new information (Edward Jay Epstein)

Three years have passed since the putative meeting in Prague between hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraq Consul al-Ani. What has the CIA, FBI, Czech intelligence (BIS) and other intelligence services established about the activities of the alleged participants at this meeting?

1) Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani served as consul at Iraq's embassy in Prague between March 1999 and April 21, 2001 and he was activity involved in agent-handling during this period. 2) Mohammed Atta applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic on May 26, 2000 in Bonn, Germany According to Czech visa records, Atta identified himself as being a "Hamburg student." Since a visa was not necessary to catch a Czech plane to the US, Czech intelligence concluded he had business in the Czech Republic. 3) Just prior to leaving for the U.S., Atta made 2 trips to the Czech Republic in 2000. The first was on May 30, where he went without a visa to the transit lounge of Prague International Airport; the second was by bus to Prague on June 2 with visa BONN200005260024. 4) On April 4, 2001, Atta checked out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach and cashed a check for $8,000 from a SunTrust account, according to the FBI. Atta was not seen again in America by any witness before April 11, 2001. 5) Al-Ani scheduled a meeting on April 8,2001 with a "Hamburg student" according to an appointment calendar subsequently turned up by Czech intelligence in a surreptitious search of the Iraq Embassy (presumably after the defeat of Iraq in April 2003.) 6) Al-Ani was observed meeting a young Arab-speaking man on the outskirts of Prague on April 8th by a watcher for Czech counterintelligence.

7) After seeing Atta’s picture on September 11th, the watcher identified the Arab-speaking man as Mohammed Atta. 8 ) Al-Ani was expelled from Prague less than 2 weeks after that meeting. 9 ) After 9-11, Al-Ani denied that he met Atta , as did the Baghdad government. Al-Ani repeated that denial after he was detained by U.S. forces in July 2003. 10 ) The CIA determined, according to George Tenet testimony before a Joint Committee of Congress (June 18, 2002): “Atta allegedly traveled outside the US in early April 2001 to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are still working to confirm or deny this allegation. It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias since we have been unable to establish that Atta left the US or entered Europe in April 2001 under his true name or any known aliases.” 11) Subsequently, Spanish intelligence found evidence that Algerians Khaled Madani and Moussa Laouar provided false passports to Mohamed Atta and his associate Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

Hey- it's off-topic but here's a fun bit o' trivia to chew since the Oil for Food scandals, gas prices, and refilling the oil reserves have been in the news lately:

1997 : (OIL RESERVES SCANDALS : ELK HILLS BUYOUT : CLINTON ADMINISTRATION ANNOUNCES PLAN TO SELL THE US NAVY'S ELK HILLS OIL & GAS RESERVE TO OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM) In 1997 the White House announced a plan to sell the Navy's Elk Hills oil and gas reserve, one of the nation's most substantial energy resources, to Occidental Petroleum. "It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental's U.S. oil reserves overnight," reported the Center for Public Integrity's Charles Lewis in his recent book, "The Buying of the President 2000."
The Elk Hills buyout was great news for Occidental stockholders, of whom the most prominent was Albert Gore Sr., the vice president's father. Upon his father's death in 1998, Gore took control of his estate, including $500,000 worth of Occidental stock. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, Congress had resisted similar attempts to privatize the nation's energy resources, but it relented when the $3.65 billion Occidental buyout was proposed as one of Gore's "reinventing government" plans. The oil company has a long and mostly overlooked relationship with the Gore family, with Gore's father becoming known inside the halls of Congress as "the Senator from Occidental."
Not only did the relationship enrich Gore Sr., but Occidental has donated more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees since Gore Jr. became Clinton's sidekick in 1992, reported Lewis. The VP himself has received over $35,000 in Occidental contributions. - "'Investigate Gore's Occidental Conflict,' Cheney Challenges Press," Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff , Sunday August 27, 2000; 8:46 PM EDT

The meeting was affirmed publicly by Czech officials, and denied by anonymous US intelligence officials speaking to journalists. The New York Times ran a denial that was particularly deceptive (details here and here). I believe Isikoff and Hosenball of Newsweek also served as a channel for denials, or perhaps they just bring it up a lot as an example of a bogus connection to Iraq.

No-one denies that Atta went to Prague previously, in June 2000. Robert Baer, in his books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil, says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed relocated to Prague after evading an FBI attempt to catch him in Qatar in 1997. Prague was also the location of a 1998 plot by Iraq to bomb the towers of Radio Free Europe.

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