Update on the Ger­man Con­nec­tions to 9/11

Record­ed Sep­tem­ber 24, 2006

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Intro­duc­tion: Fur­ther explor­ing 9/11 hijack­er Mohamed Atta’s Ger­man asso­ciates in Flori­da, this inter­view with Daniel Hop­sick­er sheds more light on the mys­te­ri­ous and sin­is­ter Wolf­gang Bohringer, one of the Ger­mans who Atta referred to as his “broth­er.” (For more on Bohringer, see FTR#542. For more about Atta’s Ger­man asso­ciates in Flori­da, see FTR#477.) Hav­ing relo­cat­ed to remote Fan­ning Island (one of the Kiri­bati Islands, for­mer­ly known as the Gilberts), Bohringer is report­ed­ly plan­ning on open­ing a flight school for trainikng peo­ple to fly DC3’s, an excel­lent air­craft for smug­gling con­tra­band. This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a career of shad­owy and osten­si­bly ille­gal activ­i­ties in which Bohringer has been involved. For­mer­ly work­ing as a pilot for Czech crim­i­nal king­pin Vic­tor Kozeny, Bohringer keeps large amounts of cash and weapons on his yacht moored at Fan­ning Island. Bohringer’s for­mer employ­er Kozeny has alleged­ly been involved with Bush fam­i­ly asso­ciates in a decades-long scheme to laun­der mon­ey to help cor­rupt U.S. elec­tions. Acquain­tances on Fan­ning Island describe Bohringer as rabid­ly anti-Semit­ic, lend­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty to some of Mr. Emory’s pre­vi­ous spec­u­la­tion that Bohringer, and per­haps oth­er Ger­man asso­ciates of Atta’s, may well be of Nazi per­sua­sion.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Bohringer’s involve­ment in an Atlanta com­put­er com­pa­ny alleged­ly involved in mas­sive fraud; the involve­ment of Bohringer’s boss Kozeny in a scheme to gain con­trol over the state-run oil com­pa­ny of Azer­bai­jan; Kozeny’s alleged involve­ment in mas­sive drug smug­gling; the alleged involve­ment of Kozeny with an exec­u­tive of insur­ance AIG; Bohringer’s close asso­ci­a­tion with the Fly­ing Club of Munich; the Fly­ing Club of Munich’s report­ed Nazi asso­ci­a­tions; attempts by law enforce­ment to cov­er-up the Ger­man con­nec­tions of Atta and the 9/11 hijack­ers’ links to a glob­al crim­i­nal net­work.

1. Intro­duc­ing the sub­ject of the broad­cast, the dis­cus­sion begins by high­light­ing fea­tures of the career of Wolf­gang Bohringer, one of 9/11 hijack­er Mohamed Atta’s clos­est friends–one of a num­ber of Ger­mans with whom Atta asso­ci­at­ed in Flori­da and a man with (as Mr. Emory likes to say) more con­nec­tions than a switch­board. Cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing out of a remote Pacif­ic island, Bohringer appears to be part of the “glob­al net­work” that Tony Blair iden­ti­fied as being behind the 9/11 attack. “One of Mohamed Atta’s clos­est asso­ciates in Flori­da before the 9/11 attack today car­ries a chest on his yacht filled with sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars in new bills, auto­mat­ic weapons, pass­ports from a half-dozen nations, and works for a major inter­na­tion­al mob­ster. Wolf­gang Bohringer, a Ger­man pilot, iden­ti­fied by Atta’s one-time girl­friend Aman­da Keller as one of Mohamed Atta’s clos­est asso­ciates in Flori­da dur­ing the run-up to the 9.11 attack, and one of the hand­ful of peo­ple the ter­ror­ist ring­leader called “my broth­er,” recent­ly resur­faced on a tiny island in the South Pacif­ic, in the Repub­lic of Kiri­bati. There he announced his inten­tion to set up a flight school on Fan­ning Island, almost a thou­sand miles south of Hawaii and one of the most remote places on Earth. Bohringer plans to teach pilots how to fly DC3’s, the 70-year old avi­a­tion work­horse fre­quent­ly used in weapons and drug smug­gling.”
(“ ‘Close Asso­ciate’ of Mohamed Atta Sur­faces in South Pacif­ic” by Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 9/15/2006.)

2. On Fan­ning Island, Bohringer is plan­ning to open a flight school to teach pilots to fly DC3’s—an old but very ser­vice­able air­craft that is ide­al for the smug­gling of con­tra­band. Knowl­edge­able experts say the DC3 could also be adapt­ed to aer­i­al spray­ing. Bio­log­i­cal war­fare ter­ror­ism any­one? “The island has no elec­tric­i­ty, and a pop­u­la­tion of bare­ly one hun­dred souls. While it hard­ly seems an ide­al place for a flight school, the remote loca­tion and lack of offi­cial scruti­ny may make it ide­al for some­thing. Bohringer, accom­pa­nied by a woman he report­ed­ly met over the Inter­net named Ana Maria Uhr, almost imme­di­ate­ly aroused sus­pi­cion, after he announced plans for a flight school train­ing what local cit­i­zens sus­pect­ed would be an assort­ment of smug­glers and mer­ce­nar­ies to fly DC3’s. Alarmed local res­i­dents con­tact­ed The Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews about the Ger­man pilot, offer­ing new details which prompt­ed us to take a clos­er look at him as a pos­si­ble link to the elu­sive glob­al net­work which British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair, two weeks after 9/11, said had assist­ed the ter­ror­ist hijack­ers.” (Idem.)

3. Bohringer is also asso­ci­at­ed with a major Czech orga­nized fig­ure named Vic­tor Kozeny. One ques­tion that sug­gests itself is whether or not Mohamed Atta’s pres­ence in Prague may have had some­thing to do with the Bohringer/Kozeny rela­tion­ship. Note that the milieu of Atta and the 9/11 hijack­ers also over­laps the milieu of the Alfa group (see FTR#530). As is the case with Kozeny, Alfa over­laps the milieux of drug smug­gling and petro­le­um intrigue in the for­mer Sovi­et Union. Are Kozeny’s activ­i­ties in Azer­bai­jan relat­ed to the activ­i­ties of Alfa? “Dur­ing the same peri­od Wolf­gang Bohringer was hang­ing out with Mohamed Atta, Bohringer was the per­son­al pilot of a noto­ri­ous Czech Mob­ster named Vic­tor Kozeny, who is known as the ‘Pirate of Prague.’ Kozeny owns a pri­vate island in the Bahamas, trav­els on an Irish pass­port, and is cur­rent­ly fight­ing extra­di­tion to the U.S. on charges of mas­sive finan­cial fraud and alleged­ly pay­ing mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar bribes to gov­ern­ment offi­cials in the Repub­lic of Azer­bai­jan in an effort to take-over that oil-rich country’s State Oil Com­pa­ny. After defraud­ing thou­sands of peo­ple around the world while trav­el­ing on an Irish pass­port, includ­ing the chair­man of the North­ern Ire­land peace talks, Sen­a­tor George Mitchell, Kozeny sought refuge in the Bahamas. Bohringer had opened a flight school in Naples, Flori­da in 1996, ille­gal for a for­eign­er. But he had­n’t got­ten in any trou­ble with the FAA.” (Idem.)

4. “Per­haps his asso­ci­a­tion as the per­son­al pilot for a major East­ern Euro­pean Mafia fig­ure named Vic­tor Kozeny had helped. Kozeny is the sub­ject of inves­ti­ga­tions by the FBI and US Cus­toms, and was recent­ly charged in the U.S. with steal­ing $182 mil­lion dol­lars by the Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney. Bohringer moved to Atlanta to began a posi­tion as cor­po­rate pilot in Feb­ru­ary 1, 2001, accord­ing to his online bio, for a soft­ware com­pa­ny called HBOC. No doubt it is just a coin­ci­dence, or dashed bad luck, but Bohringer’s new employ­er was involved in a major account­ing scan­dal that cost share­hold­ers $9 bil­lion of lost val­ue in a sin­gle day. ‘HBOC was found to be a mob bust-out,’ a finan­cial ana­lyst emailed us. Kozeny, we were shocked to dis­cov­er, had at some point in the mid-90’s con­trolled one-third of the entire Czecho­slo­va­kian econ­o­my. ‘Kozeny bought fac­to­ries and ‘rides’ on pipelines, mean­ing they crossed land he owned and paid big for the priv­i­lege.’” (Idem.)

5. Kozeny’s ques­tion­able activ­i­ties may over­lap an inter­na­tion­al mon­ey-laun­der­ing scan­dal involv­ing asso­ciates of the Bush fam­i­ly and involv­ing the ille­gal fund­ing of U.S. elec­tions. “With his ill-got­ten gains, Kozeny tried to buy off top offi­cials in the for­mer Sovi­et Repub­lic of Azer­bai­jan to gain con­trol of that coun­try’s state-owned oil com­pa­ny. One man already con­vict­ed in the scheme, Hans Bod­mer, belonged to a net­work of Russ­ian oli­garchs, one of whom, Pyotr Aven, has been accused by a Russ­ian cor­rup­tion task force of being engaged in drug traf­fick­ing. Kozeny’s part­ners in the Azeri scheme includ­ed a man­ag­ing direc­tor of Hank Green­berg’s Amer­i­can Insur­ance Group (AIG). Green­berg was forced to step down amid the Eliot Spitzer probe, a scan­dal, it is rumored, which involved a major Bush fam­i­ly and asso­ciates’ inter­na­tion­al mon­ey-laun­der­ing oper­a­tion that has spanned more than a gen­er­a­tion and has been used to ille­gal­ly fund US elec­tions since the Nixon era.” (Idem.)

6. The fact that one of Kozeny’s alleged col­lab­o­ra­tors in the above con­spir­a­cy is an exec­u­tive with AIG is inter­est­ing, and pos­si­bly sig­nif­i­cant. AIG has an inter­est­ing pedi­gree, over­lap­ping both the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and the world of GOP rightwing pol­i­tics. Note Atta’s move­ments in Feb­ru­ary of 2001. Was he vis­it­ing poten­tial tar­gets with Bohringer? (For more about the shady doings of AIG, see FTR#531.) “AIG was found­ed from Asia Life/CV Starr, a Shang­hai-based inter­na­tion­al import/export and insur­ance firm found­ed in 1919 by Cor­nelius V. Starr, an Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS) oper­a­tive in South­east Asia dur­ing World War II. Clin­ton antag­o­nist Ken­neth Starr is his nephew. Cur­rent­ly, Kozeny is await­ing extra­di­tion to the U.S. from the Bahamas. A pros­e­cu­tor there revealed in court that Kozeny pos­sess­es an aston­ish­ing num­ber of pass­ports, includ­ing six from Ire­land alone. ‘He appears to be able to pro­duce for­eign pass­ports at will,’ stat­ed the pros­e­cu­tor. Atta and Al She­hhi flew or drove to Atlanta on sev­er­al occa­sions dur­ing the month of Feb­ru­ary 2001. To meet with Wolf­gang? On two of those vis­its, Atta rent­ed a plane, the first with a pilot, the sec­ond unescort­ed, and vis­it­ed an area of Ten­nessee where he observed a dam, and sev­er­al nuclear fuel pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties.” (Idem.)

7. The car­go on Bohringer’s yacht is more than a lit­tle inter­est­ing: “On his yacht, the ‘Argos,’ Bohringer was car­ry­ing a chest filled with ‘stacks of brand new hun­dred dol­lar bills, more mon­ey that I have ever seen in my life,’ wrote one local res­i­dent. Like his for­mer boss, Bohringer is no slouch in the pass­port depart­ment... Aboard Wolf­gang’s yacht were pass­ports from a half-dozen nations, and a cache of firearms, includ­ing a Glock. He claimed to be an arms deal­er, and acknowl­edged his involve­ment with East­ern Euro­pean Mob­sters. Bohringer also report­ed­ly admit­ted know­ing Mohamed Atta, but stat­ing to sev­er­al islanders that anoth­er Ger­man pilot in Naples, Rex Gasteiger, was to blame for link­ing him to 9/11. Soon sev­er­al res­i­dents qui­et­ly report­ed sur­pris­ing­ly deep sus­pi­cions to local author­i­ties. ‘To me Wolf­gang is car­ry­ing dirty mon­ey, lots of it,’ wrote one. ‘If he can gets a flight school going it does not take a stretch of the imag­i­na­tion to see he would sell it to some else who sells it to some­one else and Hon­olu­lu gets vapor­ized. He seems to know the mon­ey tree and could be work­ing to set things up for oth­ers to do so and so has been fund­ed to do so.’” (Idem.)

8. Among his many endear­ing qual­i­ties, Bohringer is appar­ent­ly vicious­ly anti-Semit­ic. In the dis­cus­sion with Daniel Hop­sick­er in the actu­al broad­cast, Daniel men­tions that the Fly­ing Club of Munich, close­ly con­nect­ed to Bohringer and his father, appears to have Nazi con­nec­tions, as Mr. Emory had sur­mised in pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion in FTR#542. “Locals on Fan­ning Island sent us the pic­tures of Wolf­gang in this sto­ry. ‘A month before Wolf­gang left with his boat he met Ana on the inter­net. He sent tick­ets and cred­it card for her to meet him in Paris. He would take her as crew on a round the world trip. First stop Hawaii. But when they were a day out of Hawaii he informed her they were sail­ing to anoth­er island and not stop­ping at Hawaii.’ ‘My friend crewed with them to Samoa, and on the trip he found Wolf­gang liked hav­ing his pic­ture tak­en,’ one local res­i­dent wrote us. On the trip Ana con­fid­ed she was real­ly wor­ried about Wolf­gang. He seemed to run­ning from some­thing. So she told him what she’d read about him on the Inter­net about the 9/11 thing.’ ‘Wolf­gang alle­vi­at­ed my con­cerns with sim­ple expla­na­tions about an unhap­py busi­ness part­ner­ship with the guy who bought his flight school,’ the res­i­dent wrote. ‘But, it was clear he hat­ed Jews. He told some very bad jokes about ovens, Jews, bread, and blacks.’ We com­pared the new pic­tures with what Aman­da Keller had told us about Wolf­gang. She called Bohringer ‘The Ice­man,’ she said, because of his resem­blance to a char­ac­ter in the movie ‘Top Gun,’ the rival to Tom Cruise played by Val Kilmer. And indeed, the resem­blance is remark­ably close.” (Idem.)

9. Res­i­dents of Fan­ning Island heard Bohringer dis­cussing hav­ing won his Green Card in a lot­tery, con­firm­ing what Atta’s girl­friend Aman­da Keller had learned. “Keller also said Wolf­gang won a lot­tery to get his green card. The locals on Fan­ning Island report that Bohringer told them that sto­ry too. So clear­ly Aman­da Keller had known Bohringer. Her tes­ti­mo­ny has once again proven cor­rect, as it also was when she told of help­ing Atta move from Deep Creek, part of the recent­ly-incor­po­rat­ed town of North Port. Doc­u­ments made pub­lic after the Mous­saoui tri­al show Atta was send­ing fax­es from a Postal Express in Deep Creek on March 11, 2001, at exact­ly the time Aman­da Keller says he was there. The Mous­saoui tri­al pro­duced the largest trove of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments about the hijack­ers’ South Flori­da move­ments. The Reporters Com­mit­tee for Free­dom of the Press was instru­men­tal in the release of many of those court doc­u­ments. The FBI fought them every step of the way. Now we know why. The doc­u­ments prove they’ve been lying. ‘Him (Atta ) and Wolf­gang drove around in the red con­vert­ible a lot,’ she said. ‘Their favorite place to eat was Hoot­ers in Sara­so­ta. They got kicked out of Hoot­ers for grab­bing their boobs.’” (Idem.)

10. Wolfgang’s activ­i­ties are def­i­nite­ly out of the ordi­nary. Note that he was one of the first of what Hop­sick­er calls “the Ger­man ele­ment” to arrive in Naples, Flori­da. “‘He spoke Ger­man with Wolf­gang, who was in his thir­ties. Wolf­gang was with Mohamed when he came by the nurs­ing home to see me one time. Mohamed called cer­tain people—Arabic people—‘my broth­er.’ And I was won­der­ing how he had so many fam­i­ly mem­bers. Like gang mem­bers do, ‘this is my broth­er,’’ she said. ‘But not all Arabs. So it wasn’t like just any­one Mus­lim was his broth­er. He called Wolf­gang and Juer­gen ‘my broth­er,’ too. He and Wolf­gang were very tight, they went every­where togeth­er. When he came into the pic­ture they were togeth­er all the time.’ The sto­ry of Wolfgang’s life to date is stud­ded, accord­ing to peo­ple we spoke with who knew him, with activ­i­ties con­sid­er­ably out of the ordi­nary. While sail­ing around the world on a 47-foot yacht, for exam­ple, instead of cross­ing the Indi­an Ocean from the coast of Africa on a direct line, he took a ‘detour’ to Bom­bay, where he met his wife Suji­ta. He was one of the first of the ‘Ger­man ele­ment’ to arrive in Flori­da, in 1996, when he opened a flight school in Naples. Pri­or to arriv­ing in Naples he was asso­ci­at­ed with an orga­ni­za­tion called ‘The Fly­ing Club of Munich,’ in Augs­burg, Ger­many. In Spring 2002, he became a nat­u­ral­ized U.S. cit­i­zen.” (Idem.)

11. Note that Bohringer, like Rudi Dekkers (the head of Huff­man Avi­a­tion, the flight school through which Atta and oth­er 9/11 hijack­ers infil­trat­ed the U.S.), appears to have been immune to arrest and pros­e­cu­tion by law enforce­ment author­i­ties, despite enor­mous wrong­do­ing. “Like Rudi Dekkers, Wolf­gang was noto­ri­ous in avi­a­tion cir­cles for bad behav­ior. We found records of his scrapes in the files of air­port author­i­ties in Flori­da, includ­ing a let­ter sent by a for­mer employ­ee solic­it­ing to offer pri­vate flight instruc­tion at his Wolf Aero, Bohringer’s flight school, with­out author­i­ty and in vio­la­tion of FAA rules was in the air­port records in Naples. ‘Wolf­gang showed up from Munich in the mid-1990’s and imme­di­ate­ly began oper­at­ing a flight school ille­gal­ly,’ stat­ed Naples flight instruc­tor Mar­cus Huber, a flight instruc­tor in Naples. ‘He’s half Swiss, half Ger­man.’ Like Rudi Dekkers, Wolf­gang also seems to have had a ‘hall pass’ from fed­er­al author­i­ties, which embit­tered oth­er for­eign flight train­ers not sim­i­lar­ly well-con­nect­ed. ‘When Wolf­gang applied for an E‑2 Visa, he made up a fake com­pa­ny, a clean­ing ser­vice,’ Huber told us. ‘Some­times it makes me mad that a crim­i­nal gets pref­er­ence.’ In the wake of the Sept 11 dis­as­ter, U.S. offi­cials repeat­ed­ly promised expla­na­tions. But it was left to British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair to sketch out the Cliff notes ver­sion of the case against Bin Laden. He said, ‘Al Qae­da is a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion with ties to a glob­al net­work.’” (Idem.)

12. In his arti­cle, Daniel Hop­sick­er links the net­work to which Bohringer, Dekkers and Atta belonged to a net­work iden­ti­fied by Sibel Edmonds, a rel­a­tive­ly well-known whis­tle blow­er. “Almost five years after Tony Blair first told the world that a ‘glob­al net­work’ pro­vid­ed assis­tance to the ter­ror­ist hijack­ers while they were in the U.S., what is hap­pen­ing on a tiny island in the South Pacif­ic may point towards the inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion in ques­tion. ‘You have a net­work of peo­ple who obtain cer­tain infor­ma­tion and... sell it to whomev­er would be the high­est bid­der,’ explained Sibel Edmonds, for­mer FBI trans­la­tor, who was muz­zled by U.S. Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Ashcroft, who went to the Supreme Court to ensure her silence about... some­thing. ‘There are cer­tain points where you have your drug-relat­ed activ­i­ties com­bined with mon­ey laun­der­ing and infor­ma­tion laun­der­ing, con­verg­ing with your ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties... Post‑9/11 intel­li­gence ‘fail­ures’ include the will­ful quash­ing by the Gov­ern­ment of inves­ti­ga­tions trac­ing these crim­i­nal net­works.’ Atta’s Ger­man bud­dy Bohringer works for a glob­al net­work. Did it assist Atta and the ter­ror­ist hijack­ers? Was there a con­nec­tion between the larg­er orga­ni­za­tion, or net­work, behind gang­ster financier Vic­tor Kozeny, and that of the ter­ror­ists in Flori­da plot­ting to kill Amer­i­cans on the 11th of Sep­tem­ber in 2001?” (Idem.)

13. “Aman­da Keller was not the only eye­wit­ness quot­ed men­tion­ing Atta’s Ger­man asso­ciates. Atta’s land­lord for a brief week told reporters about a wild 3‑day week­end Aman­da and Atta spent in Key West, along with anoth­er girl named Lin­da. ‘The two girls were intro­duced to two men from Ger­many that they said were Mohamed’s friends,’ Tony LaCon­ca told the Char­lotte Sun-Her­ald. When we first learned that all of Atta’s asso­ciates in Flori­da had not been Arab, we were under­stand­ably eager to learn more about the ter­ror­ist ring­lead­ers’ two Ger­man friends. Sun-Her­ald reporter Elaine Allen-Emrich had appar­ent­ly felt the same way... ‘The FBI in Tam­pa would nei­ther con­firm nor deny that any agents were inter­view­ing peo­ple in the North Port area,’ she report­ed. ‘Asked for more infor­ma­tion about Atta’s wild week­end, an FBI spokesper­son iden­ti­fied only as ‘Pam’ said, ‘We rec­om­mend that you check in with CNN for cur­rent infor­ma­tion. Any press state­ments can be found on tele­vised sta­tions like CNN.’ We went look­ing for our­selves. The results are in Wel­come to TERRORLAND. We didn’t feel like ‘check­ing in with CNN.’” (Idem.)

14. Daniel also dis­cussed the 9/11 B.S. move­ment, and the con­scious attempt to deceive peo­ple about the events of 9/11—attributing the attacks to “con­trolled demo­li­tions”, a “cruise mis­sile” hit­ting the Pen­ta­gon or “the Mossad.” For more about this, see some of Daniel’s Mad Cow Morn­ing News arti­cles, includ­ing:
“Coin­tel­pro 9/11: Peak Oil and the Lev­el Above Sau­di” By Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 9/28/2004;
“Coin­tel­pro 9/11: John Gray and Sau­di Gen­e­sis” By Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 10/6/2004;
“Khashog­gi, Cults, Cov­er-Ups & Mars & Venus Doing Lunch” by Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 10/13/2004;
“The 9/11 Hero­in Con­nec­tion” By Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 9/6/2006.