I have read their first contact was by email. But I have also read from Bergs email (posted to you above) and in articles that they met in Baghdad. Also, Aziz left the U.S. in the summer of 2003, avoiding deportation hearings for his criminal record. I haven't read anything to say he has returned to the U.S. since then.
Beheading Victim 'Loved Adventure and Risk':[FINAL Edition]
Sewell Chan.
The Washington Post.
May 14, 2004. pg. A.01
One of the people Berg met in Baghdad was Aziz Taee, an Iraqi who studied electrical engineering at Temple University and has lived in the Philadelphia area for most of the past 20 years. Taee is chairman of the Iraqi American Council, a business group based in Annandale that encourages investment in Iraq.Berg had visited the group's Web site and communicated with Taee by e-mail. When the two men finally met, Taee was impressed enough that he agreed to start a small company with Berg, called Shirikat Abraj Babil, or Babylon Towers Co.
They printed business cards advertising their services in installing, inspecting and repairing telecommunications and utility towers. They rented a small corner office on the second floor of a building in Jamiaa, a neighborhood in western Baghdad.
Taee, 40, said he sometimes worried about his 26-year-old associate, who would wander freely around Baghdad.
Perhaps you read this account from the Inquirer as implying they met AT the conference... instead of Berg sending him email (in Iraq) AFTER the conference?
Aziz told the Associated Press that Berg had contacted him by e-mail sometime after attending a two-day conference in Virginia on business opportunities in Iraq last December. Aziz agreed to give him some space in an office he had in Baghdad to form a partnership seeking communications work.Berg refers to Aziz in an e-mail to friends on Jan. 18. "I've found a fairly competent and reliable office manager," he wrote. "He's actually been living in Philadelphia the last 20 years and just came back - so he's similarly out of his element."
Very interesting stuff about Aziz Taee. It certainly looks like Philadelphia was the hub of this whole thing.
Interestingly, the Feds have been investigating and arresting a number of people in Philadelphia city government or people who somehow got funds from the government (including at least one of the leaders of a local mosque). There's probably no connection, but it would be interesting to see if any of the names of these "community leaders" turn up anywhere in relation either to Radio Prometheus or to Berg.
The leftists might be very much inclined to get involved with a local mosque; Carlos the Jackal, who converted to Islam and is still in jail in France, recently wrote a long screed telling leftists to adopt Islam. The summary I read reporated that he said that Islam is the religion of the poor and the rejection of the West, and that becoming a Muslim was displaying "solidarity" with them.