Posted on 06/06/2002 4:38:33 PM PDT by Shermy
June 6 — For more than an hour, a government loan officer was face to face with the man she now knows was the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and he asked her for a $650,000 federal loan that apparently would have financed an attack on the United States with a modified crop-duster, the officer told ABCNEWS.
In an interview with Brian Ross, Johnelle Bryant, a loan officer in Florida for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recalled how Mohamed Atta sat across from her with his "very scary" black eyes, and then railed against her when the loan was denied, asking her how she would like to see the destruction of Washington, D.C., and monuments there, which he observed in a picture on her wall.
"His eyes, he had very scary-looking eyes. His eyes were black," she remembered. "How could somebody be that evil, be that close to me, and I didn't recognize it?"
Only after seeing Atta's picture in the newspaper did she realize who the man sitting inches away from her was, and alert the FBI of the interaction.
"I think it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead," she said, telling her story for the first time to ABCNEWS, against the wishes of her employer.
"They don't look like what you think a terrorist would look like," said Bryant, who also had visits from three other figures in the Sept. 11 plots, including one who used his real name.
"I had terrorists in my office, and I helped them," Bryant said. "I gave them information unknowingly … And I'm afraid that there probably will be a next time, unless it's stopped from the ground-floor level by an American."
Financing For an Immigrant's Dream
According to Bryant, who has worked at the USDA for 16 years, Atta arrived in her office sometime between the end of April and the middle of May 2000, inquiring about a loan to finance an aircraft.
"At first, he refused to speak with me," said Bryant, remembering that Atta called her "but a female." Bryant explained that she was the manager, but he still refused to conduct business with her. Ultimately, she says, "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."
Throughout the interview, he continued to refer to Bryant as "but a female," and Bryant says "he would say it with disgust."
During the initial applicant interview, Bryant was taking notes. "I wrote his name down, and I spelled it A-T-T-A-H, and he told me, 'No, A-T-T-A, as in "Atta boy!' "
He said he had just arrived in the United States from Afghanistan "to start his dream, which was to go flight school and get his pilot's license, and work both as a charter pilot and a crop duster, too." He said he was seeking $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business.
"He wanted to finance a twin-engine six-passenger aircraft … and remove the seats," said Bryant. "He said he was an engineer, and he wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."
When Bryant explained that there was an application process, Atta became "very agitated." He thought the loan would be in cash, and that he would have no trouble obtaining it to purchase an aircraft.
He also remarked about the lack of security in the building, pointing specifically to a safe behind Bryant's desk. "He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe," said Bryant, who explained that there was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that she was trained in karate.
"He wanted to know how, once he became settled down in the United States, how he could take that kind of training," she says.
Bryant turned him down for the loan because as a non-U.S. citizen he did not meet the basic eligibility requirements and because the program is intended for actual farming purposes. But she referred him to other government agencies and to a bank downstairs.
He asked questions about whether his plans to be out of the country for a few weeks would interfere with his eligibility for a loan. "I think he said he needed to go to Madrid, and somewhere in Germany, and then there was a third country," said Bryant. (--Czech?)
Being turned down for the loan altered the hijackers' plans. According to law enforcement officials, packing twin-engine planes with explosive chemicals, making it a flying bomb, had been the terrorists' plan since the mid-1990s. When Atta reported to his group that he could not get a loan to buy smaller planes, the plan was switched to hijacking passenger jets, according to Abu Zabaydah, a captured bin Laden lieutenant.
So in the fall of 2000, the hijackers who had been learning to fly small planes began to seek simulator training in the large jets they would crash into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Familiar Places, Unfamiliar Names
Before leaving Bryant's office, Atta became fixated with an aerial photo of Washington that was hanging on her office wall.
"He just said that it was one of the prettiest, the best he'd ever seen of Washington," she said, remembering that he was impressed with the panoramic view that captured all the monuments and buildings in one photograph, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House.
"He pulled out a wad of cash," she said, "and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad."
Bryant indicated that the picture was not for sale, and he threw more money down.
"His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Bryant remembers. "I believe he said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"
Atta also expressed an interest in visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys' football stadium, mentioning that the team was "America's team" and the stadium had a "whole in the roof."
Atta also talked about life in his country. "He mentioned al Qaeda, he mentioned Osama bin Laden," said Bryant. "I didn't know who Osama bin Laden was … He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew."
He boasted about the role that they would one day play. "He said this man would someday be known as the world's greatest leader," she said.
Bryant and Atta shook hands on his way out. "I told him I wished him luck with his endeavor," remembered Bryant.
‘How Could I Have Known?’
Bryant never thought to report her strange encounter, because she thought she was just helping a new immigrant learn about the country.
"I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from, with all the violence, as compared to the United States," she says. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could make it."
His questions about American cities, she assumed, were because he had moved to a new country and he wanted to find out about the major cities.
"How could I have known? I couldn't have known, prior to Sept. 11. I don't think anyone else would have either, if they'd been in my shoes that day," she says. "Should I have picked up the telephone and called someone? You can't ask me that more often than I have asked myself that … I don't know how I could possibly expect myself to have recognized what that man was. And yet sometimes I haven't forgiven myself."
Bryant hopes her story will serve as a warning to all Americans.
"The American people, the public, need to be aware that if these men can walk into my office, they can walk into your office, they can walk into anyone's office," she says. "If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me on my first encounter with that man, and then someone walks into another American's office and behaves in the same manner, then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and perhaps they will pick up the phone and make the call that I didn't make."
Maybe because he was a lunatic? Many a lunatic can't help but act like a lunatic, at least some of the time.
The conversation she remembers
with slight alteration
easily could have come out of "The Devils"
with Stavrogin as interlocutor.
Thanks for the research. Bryant, then, is probably legit. But laying it on a little thick for the benefit of the klieg lights.
But I still wonder where ABC got the info on Zubaydah's testimony...
After I made my previous post, I started thinking the same thing as you. Atta has consistently been described by many people as an unpleasant, threatening individual.
That's why I think the 09-11-01 letters were composed by Atta, himself. ("You die now", etc.)
His name is in the letters to NBC News and the NY Post (the highlighted A-T-T-A that it looks like he may have gone over repeatedly with his pen, as a "signature").
On the other hand, it's known the terrorists were interested in crop dusters — either to spread anthrax or to use as kamikaze weapons. Check out this essay in Technology Review by Richard A. Muller, which explores the flying Molotov theory.
The only way it could happen is if Atta was a schizo, and everynow and then he becomes a raving idiot blabbing to everyone; and that at the same time she is so STUPID that she would keep quiet when a person made threatening remarks towards her and Washington DC.
I might accept her lack of intelligence, but i refuse to believe for one moment Atta would be so dumb as to reveal all to someone who could potentially ruin all his plans, and by doing so prevent him from getting his harem of virgins!
He had to keep it secret from everyone, including the majority of the hijackers/terrorists/kamikaze pilots. And these were people he had to trust, at least to the level of taking over the planes. And yet he did not tell most of them everything.
However he would have the temerity to go do this lady, and put himself, his cronies, and his 'mission' in jeopardy? It does not add up!
The only way this could have happened as the lady said it did was if Atta had some sort of subconscious wish to put the mission in jeopardy. Maybe he did not want to die, and the only way he could get out of it was to get arrested (since the alternative would be for him to refuse the mission, and die a horrible death at the hands of some MiddleEastern hitmen a few months later). That is the only scenario where the lady's assertions could be possible.
However i doubt that was the case since these ppl are completely brainwashed, and filled with so much zeal that they are virtual automatons for the terrorist demagogues!
Once this turns out to be a fake someone should tell that lady never again to waste peoples time, and federal resources, on some snipe hunt!
Agreed. But every so often his true nature might have emerged.
Most of the highjackers didn't even know they were on a suicide mission,
I know that this has been speculated, but we don't really know if the others knew or not.
it seems unlikely to me he would blab his intentions to a federal paper pusher.
That was my first reaction. But, if Atta did say these things, it wasn't in a way that got Bryant to report the threat even to the local police.
It also wouldn't be the only incident of this sort. Didn't Atta express strange questions about a chemical plant? And one of the hijackers (Alhaznawi) got treatment for what, in retrospect, seems to have been cutaneous anthrax. They really didn't cover t
Agreed. But every so often his true nature might have emerged.
Most of the highjackers didn't even know they were on a suicide mission,
I know that this has been speculated, but we don't really know if the others knew or not.
it seems unlikely to me he would blab his intentions to a federal paper pusher.
That was my first reaction. But, if Atta did say these things, it wasn't in a way that got Bryant to report the threat even to the local police.
It also wouldn't be the only incident of this sort. Didn't Atta express strange questions about a chemical plant? And one of the hijackers (Alhaznawi) got treatment for what, in retrospect, seems to have been cutaneous anthrax.
They really didn't cover their tracks that meticulously. Unfortunately, it's only obvious in hindsight.
I've lived many years without having a name tag up on my office, desk or cubicle for the simple reason that sometimes you get a walk-in who might want to kill you. Frequently they will tell you just that.
Mr. Atta's conversation with the SBA/USDA loan officer sounds very typical of the sort of thing that those folks run into every day. You would not believe how bad the public can be!
Huh? What did he mean by this? Wasn't Atta Egyptian? Does this mean he considered Palestine part of his "country"? Or might it mean that Atta was really Palestinian?
Exactly. With Osama and other wealthy Arabs bankrolling their murderous plots, they hardly needed to apply for a freepin' federal loan.
No doubt she will remember this for the rest of her life.
The only thing that's happened to her story since then is that she's put it in a coherent order and highlighted parts of the conversation that now make some sense.
The question is, was Mr. Atta going to take anthrax and spray it over South Florida or New York or Washington, or was he going to turn that plane into a flying bomb?
Or, maybe he was going to do both?
Regarding AlQeada financial responsibility, I would suppose somebody told him to just get a government loan to "help out". He tried. Didn't get it. Then he undertook a less expensive option. Some AlQeada paymaster simply refused to pay the bill for this "risky scheme", eh?!
Oh I believe it! Half of the people in this country can't tell you the name of our Vice President, much less the name of a Saudi Arabian terrorist. I also believe Atta would have boasted (perhaps not as much as she claims), because they are convinced we Americans are totally inept. They're only half right and it's gonna be up the the other half to keep their eyes open.
Now I don't care how many times a day a person is threatened on the job, if a middle eastern man came in and made those statements, I believe the fog would lift enough for me to make a report on this. But then, I haven't been brainwashed with such 'tolerance' messages as the goverment employees have.
I do not think it is at all strange that he thought he could get a loan from the government. First, I do not believe being a non-citizen would prevent you from getting such a loan. I have no proof, but I truly believe our government does give loans to non-citizens and very-newly made citizens. There is no way, in this economy, they could afford to buy motels, convenience stores, etc. In fact, the local motel owner, who quickly told my son he was Hindu (after 9/11) said he got a low interest loan of 250,000 to purchase and refurbish the motel, from the US government.
Why wouldn't foreigners think we would give them money for this. I believe the word is out around the world, just show up in America and they will set you up for life.
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