Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. (The flash dri­ve includes the anti-fas­cist books avail­able on this site.)

NB: This descrip­tion con­tains an impor­tant update on Ernst Uhrlau, as well as oth­er impor­tant infor­ma­tion not includ­ed in the orig­i­nal broad­cast.

Lis­ten: MP3

Side 1  Side 2

Intro­duc­tion: For­mer NSA employ­ee Thomas Drake dis­closed that NSA spy­ing on Ger­many should come as no sur­prise. The pres­ence of 9/11 hijack­ers in Ham­burg prompt­ed the agency to tar­get Ger­many as its num­ber one tar­get in Europe.

This pro­gram high­lights German/Underground Reich con­nec­tions to both the 9/11 attacks and the Okla­homa City bomb­ing. German/Underground Reich links to oth­er major ter­ror­ist inci­dents are dis­cussed as well. Of pri­ma­ry impor­tance are the career of Ernst Uhrlau and dis­turb­ing evi­dence that ele­ments of BND were run­ning Mohamed Atta.

Ernst Uhrlau was chief of police in Ham­burg dur­ing the time peri­od in which Ger­man intel­li­gence had tak­en the Ham­burg cell of 9/11 hijack­ers under sur­veil­lance. In 1998, he was appoint­ed spe­cial advis­er to Chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl on intel­li­gence mat­ters.

(The son of Hel­mut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strass­meir, may well have been the mas­ter­mind of the Okla­homa City bomb­ing. See the pho­to at right and dis­cus­sion below. With Uhrlau as spe­cial advis­er to Chan­cel­lor Kohl on intel­li­gence mat­ters, and with Andreas Strass­meir appar­ent­ly hav­ing over­seen the OKC bomb­ing plot, there is ample rea­son to bug the Chan­cel­lor’s phone!)

In 2005, Uhrlau became head of the BND! Dur­ing his tenure as BND direc­tor, files on BND offi­cers with SS and Gestapo back­grounds were shred­ded. Accord­ing to Der Spiegel, BND offi­cers were recruit­ed from the fam­i­lies of BND oper­a­tives, per­mit­ting a per­pet­u­a­tion of Nazi ide­ol­o­gy and method­ol­o­gy from the orig­i­nal Gehlen SS and Gestapo recruits!

(For new­er users of this web­site, we note that it is impos­si­ble to briefly explain the con­cept of The Under­ground Reich. The very men­tion of such a term will seem like mad­ness to the uni­ti­ti­at­ed. We rec­om­mend that peo­ple read The Nazis Go Under­ground, Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile, The New Ger­many and the Old Nazis, and “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt.”)

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of the role of the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft in the move­ments of Mohamed Atta; the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft’s ties with Ger­man indus­try; review of the con­trol of cor­po­rate Ger­many by the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work; review of infor­ma­tion devel­oped by the BKA (Ger­many’s fed­er­al police) that Atta’s asso­ciates in South Flori­da were the chil­dren of promi­nent Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists; Mohamed Atta’s rela­tion­ship with the Goethe Insti­tute, wide­ly seen as a front for the BND; review of many appar­ent links of SICO to the 9/11 attacks (SICO is the Gene­va-based hold­ing com­pa­ny for the Bin Laden fam­i­ly’s var­ied and lucra­tive enter­pris­es); review of SICO’s avi­a­tion sub­sidiary’s train­ing of pilots at Huff­man Avi­a­tion; review of SICO co-chair­man Bau­doin Dunand’s links to Fran­cois Genoud; review of Genoud’s links to the 9/11 mon­ey trail and Bank Al-Taqwa; review of SICO’s use of the Clearstream net­work, very pos­si­bly to gen­er­ate funds for the 9/11 attacks.

With the rhetor­i­cal firestorm of faux out­rage com­ing from the EU and Angela Merkel’s office over NSA spy­ing, it is impor­tant to recall some very impor­tant infor­ma­tion.

Much of what is pre­sent­ed below will be review for vet­er­an listeners/readers.

We call atten­tion to Ernst Uhrlau, chief of police in Ham­burg dur­ing the time peri­od in which Ger­man intel­li­gence had tak­en the Ham­burg cell of 9/11 hijack­ers under sur­veil­lance. In 1998, he was appoint­ed spe­cial advis­er to Chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl on intel­li­gence mat­ters. 

(The son of Hel­mut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strass­meir, may well have been the mas­ter­mind of the Okla­homa City bomb­ing. See the pho­to at right and dis­cus­sion below. With Uhrlau as spe­cial advis­er to Chan­cel­lor Kohl on intel­li­gence mat­ters, and with Andreas Strass­meir appar­ent­ly hav­ing over­seen the OKC bomb­ing plot, there is ample rea­son to bug the Chan­cel­lor’s phone!)

In 2005, Uhrlau became head of the BND!

It should come as no sur­prise that the NSA would tar­get Ger­many as a “hot spot” for elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance. An overview of the most impor­tant ter­ror­ist inci­dents affect­ing the Unit­ed States over the last quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry reveals impor­tant evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries lead­ing to Ger­many:

• The bomb­ing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Locker­bie, Scot­land, in 1988 was exe­cut­ed in Ger­many. The bomb was placed aboard the plane in Ger­many and the bombers were heav­i­ly infil­trat­ed by Ger­man intel­li­gence. One or more of the cell of bombers was a Ger­man intel­li­gence oper­a­tive.
• The financ­ing for the first World Trade Cen­ter bomb­ing in 1993 came from oper­a­tives in Ger­many.
• The actu­al mas­ter­mind of the Okla­homa City bomb­ing, accord­ing to ATF infor­mant Car­ol Howe, was Andreas Strass­meier. Strass­meir was a “for­mer” Bun­deswehr offi­cer and the son of Chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl’s chief of staff. Andreas’ grand­fa­ther was one of the char­ter mem­bers of the NSDAP under Hitler. The resem­blance between Strass­meir and “John Doe #2” is strik­ing. (“John Doe #2 is an indi­vid­ual seen in the com­pa­ny of con­vict­ed Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh. He has nev­er been for­mal­ly iden­ti­fied.)
• Not only did the 9/11 hijack con­spir­a­tors coa­lesce in Ham­burg, but there is strong evi­dence that Ger­man intel­li­gence was involved with the attack. Many of hijack­er Mohamed Atta’s asso­ciates in South Flori­da were Ger­mans. Atta was moved around under the cov­er of the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety (Gesellschaft). (See text excerpts below.) In Flori­da, he was asso­ci­at­ing with the sons and daugh­ters of promi­nent Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists. (See text excerpts below.) Of inter­est, also, is the fact that CIA pilots appar­ent­ly made a “run” to the Bor­mann ranch. (See text excerpts below.) This sounds like a reg­u­lar route. In our con­ver­sa­tions with Daniel Hop­sick­er, we have not­ed that the South Flori­da avi­a­tion milieu had been a focal point of covert oper­a­tions for decades, dat­ing back to the Sec­ond World War. The Bor­mann ranch was in the three-bor­ders area high­light­ed in FTR #457. Did the Ger­man asso­ciates of Mohamed Atta come up the oth­er end of that pipeline?
• There are numer­ous evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries between the first World Trade Cen­ter attack, the Okla­homa City bomb­ing and the 9/11 attacks, as set forth in FTR #330.
• The “vac­u­um clean­er” activ­i­ties of NSA/GCHQ have been known for a long time–we have done pro­grams about it dat­ing back many years. The for­mal, pub­lic attack on the ECHELON net­work began in 1998. That attack came from Ger­many and Under­ground Reich-asso­ci­at­ed ele­ments such as the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion.
• In August of 1998, sev­er­al things hap­pened almost simultaneously–as the German/EU/Free Con­gress Foundation/Underground Reich attack on ECHELON/Menwith Hill was gain­ing momen­tum, Osama bin Laden stopped using his cell phone and began using couri­ers for impor­tant com­mu­ni­ca­tion. At this time, Ger­man intel­li­gence had the Ham­burg cell (of 9/11 hijack­ers) under elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance. Ger­man intel­li­gence did NOT alert the Unit­ed States.
• The chief of the Ham­burg police in this pre­cise time peri­od was Ernst Uhrlau. In 1998, Uhlr­lau was appoint­ed spe­cial advis­er to the Chan­cel­lor on intel­li­gence mat­ters. (The Chan­cel­lor at the time was Hel­mut Kohl. Kohl’s chief of staff was Gun­ther Strass­meier, father of the afore­men­tioned Andreas Strass­meier!)
• In 2005, Uhrlau was appoint­ed head of the BND!
• In an update, we learn that Ger­many is threat­en­ing to sus­pend the SWIFT agree­ment allow­ing the U.S. to track bank trans­fer data to mon­i­tor the flow of ter­ror­ist mon­ey. The Ger­man jus­tice min­is­ter said she fears the pro­gram is used to gath­er eco­nom­ic intel­li­gence. Not­ing the relatin­ship between the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft and Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions, it isn’t much of a reach to extrap­o­late that the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work is a focal point of that intel­li­gence gath­er­ing.
• Mohamed Atta stud­ied Ger­man at the Goethe Insti­tute, wide­ly used as a front for the BND.
• A fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant detail con­cern­ing the hijack­ers is the fact that Yeslam bin Laden’s SICO sub­sidiary trained its pilots at Rudi Dekkers’ Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Venice, Flori­da! Huff­man is the school at which Atta and com­pa­ny were “trained.” Although he denies it, there are pro­found indi­ca­tions that Yeslam and SICO are involved with the activ­i­ties of Al Qae­da. This sub­ject will be dealt with at greater length below. Note that there are numer­ous con­nec­tions between the milieu of Huff­man Avi­a­tion and the Iran-Con­tra-con­nect­ed drug smug­gling routes. Recall that SICO per­son­nel were involved with some of these Iran-Con­tra drug routes. (For more about SICO and 9/11, see FTR #‘s 498 & 499.)
• The co-chair­man of the board of direc­tors of SICO is Bau­doin Dunand a friend and pro­fes­sion­al asso­ciate of Fran­cois Genoud. He also was Genoud’s coun­sel.
• Repris­ing an item of dis­cus­sion from FTR#357, the pro­gram cites the opin­ion of Ernest Back­es (one of Europe’s fore­most experts on mon­ey laun­der­ing) con­cern­ing the role of Fran­cois Genoud in the devel­op­ment of the events of 9/11. Genoud (who com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1996) was very close to Al Taqwa per­son­ages, espe­cial­ly Achmed Huber. Bank Al Taqwa appears to have played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the financ­ing of Al Qaeda’s activ­i­ties, as well as those of Hamas. Accord­ing to Back­es, Genoud was also a finan­cial advis­er to the Bin Laden fam­i­ly.
• It is impor­tant, in this con­text, to review the Clearstream finan­cial net­work. The con­nect­ing links between Clearstream, Al Taqwa, the Ban­co del Got­tar­do (for­mer­ly the Swiss branch of the Ban­co Ambrosiano) and Bin Laden were fur­ther described by one of Clearstream’s founders, Ernest Back­es. Note the open­ing of 16 unreg­is­tered accounts by SICO in the spring of 2001. Is there a rela­tion­ship between the liq­ui­da­tion of the finan­cial enti­ties in ear­ly 2001 by Rochat, Dunand and Zuck­er and the open­ing of the Clearstream accounts at approx­i­mate­ly the same time? (This is dis­cussed at greater length in FTR #‘s 498 & 499.)
• UPDATE: Angela Merkel has pro­posed an EU-wide com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem to guard against NSA and GCHQ spy­ing, while ramp­ing up spy­ing against the U.S.

“Embassy Espi­onage: The NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin” by SPIEGEL staff; Der Spiegel; 10/27/2013.

. . . . For­mer NSA employ­ee Thomas Drake does not see this as a con­tra­dic­tion. “After the attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, Ger­many became intel­li­gence tar­get num­ber one in Europe,” he says. The US gov­ern­ment did not trust Ger­many, because some of the Sept. 11 sui­cide pilots had lived in Ham­burg. . . .

“Ernst Uhrlau”; Wikipedia.

. . . . From 1996–98, Ernst Uhrlau was the Chief of Ham­burg Police. In 1998, Uhrlau was appoint­ed a Coor­di­na­tor of the Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty in the office of the Chan­cel­lor.

On 1 Decem­ber 2005, he was appoint­ed to the post of the head of the BND. . . .

“Obscur­ing the Past: Intel­li­gence Agency Destroyed Files on For­mer SS Mem­bers” by Klaus Wiegrefe; Der Spiegel; 11/30/2013.

His­to­ri­ans con­duct­ing an inter­nal study of ties between employ­ees of the Ger­man for­eign intel­li­gence agency and the Third Reich have made a shock­ing dis­cov­ery. In 2007, the BND destroyed per­son­nel files of employ­ees who had once been mem­bers of the SS and the Gestapo. . . .

. . . . Now, only one week before Uhrlau’s retire­ment, the com­mis­sion has uncov­ered what is a true his­tor­i­cal scan­dal. The researchers have found that the BND destroyed the per­son­nel files of around 250 BND offi­cials in 2007. The agency has con­firmed that this hap­pened.

The com­mis­sion claims that the destroyed doc­u­ments include papers on peo­ple who were “in sig­nif­i­cant intel­li­gence posi­tions in the SS, the SD (the intel­li­gence agency of the SS and the Nazi Par­ty) or the Gestapo.” They added that some of the indi­vid­u­als had even been inves­ti­gated after 1945 for pos­si­ble war crimes. His­to­rian Klaus-Diet­mar Henke, spokesman for the com­mis­sion, told SPIEGEL ONLINE he was “some­what stunned” by the occur­rence.

Did Agency Employ­ees Seek to Sab­o­tage Inves­ti­ga­tion? . . .

. . . . It is no secret that some peo­ple with­in the BND are unhap­py about Uhrlau’s project. Some employ­ees are fun­da­men­tally opposed to the agency shed­ding light on its own past. Oth­ers are wor­ried about the rep­u­ta­tions of their own fam­i­lies — for many years, the BND delib­er­ately recruit­ed new staff from among the rel­a­tives of exist­ing BND employ­ees. . . .

“Ger­mans Were Track­ing Sept. 11 Con­spir­a­tors as Ear­ly as 1998, Doc­u­ments Dis­close” by Desmond But­ler; New York Times; 1/18/2003; p. A10.

. . . . Three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Germany’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice was track­ing promi­nent mem­bers of the Ham­burg ter­ror­ist cell that planned and exe­cuted the air­craft hijack­ings, accord­ing to new­ly obtained doc­u­ments. The doc­u­ments, includ­ing intel­li­gence reports, sur­veil­lance logs and tran­scripts of inter­cepted tele­phone calls, appear to con­tra­dict pub­lic claims by the Ger­man author­i­ties that they knew lit­tle about the mem­bers of the Ham­burg cell before the attacks.

As ear­ly as 1998, the records show, the Ger­mans mon­i­tored a meet­ing between men sus­pected of plot­ting the attacks. The sur­veil­lance would lead a year lat­er to the Ham­burg apart­ment where Mohamed Atta and oth­er main plot­ters were liv­ing while attend­ing uni­ver­si­ties. While the records do not indi­cate that author­i­ties heard any men­tion of a spe­cific plan, they depict a sur­veil­lance mis­sion exten­sive enough to raise anew the polit­i­cally sen­si­tive ques­tion of whether the Ger­mans missed a chance to dis­rupt the cell dur­ing the ini­tial stages of plan­ning the attacks. Some Amer­i­can inves­ti­ga­tors and offi­cials have argued that the Ger­mans in the past missed evi­dence that could have stopped the plot. The Ger­mans have main­tained stead­fastly that the infor­ma­tion they had was too scanty to war­rant seri­ous alarm, and that their police and intel­li­gence agen­cies were not focused on Al Qae­da at the time.

The doc­u­ments come from the files of var­i­ous Ger­man police and intel­li­gence agen­cies. They detail how close an inves­ti­ga­tion of Qae­da con­tacts in Ham­burg begun in 1997 by the Con­sti­tu­tional Pro­tec­tion Agency, Germany’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice, came to the main cell mem­bers. They were pro­vided to The New York Times by some­one with offi­cial access to the files of the con­tin­u­ing inves­ti­ga­tion into the events lead­ing to the Sept. 11 attacks. When the doc­u­ments were described to offi­cials at the Ger­man Inte­rior Min­istry and the con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion police, they declined to answer any ques­tions about them but did not dis­pute their authen­tic­i­ty . . .

. . . . Mr. Motas­sadeq admit­ted that he knew Mr. Atta and oth­er plot­ters and had attend­ed Qae­da train­ing camps in Afghanistan. He has main­tained in tri­al tes­ti­mony that he did not know that his friends were plan­ning to attack the Unit­ed States. No evi­dence has been pre­sented at his three-month tri­al that would reveal when the police first opened an inquiry into Mr. Motas­sadeq. But the intel­li­gence agency doc­u­ments show that by August 1998 he was under sur­veil­lance and that the trail soon led to most of the main par­tic­i­pants in the lat­er attacks. [It was in August of 1998 that Pres­i­dent Clin­ton ordered the cruise mis­sile strike against Bin Laden and the same month that Bin Laden went to a couri­er sys­tem instead of using his cell phone. Note, also, that the head of the Ham­burg police at the time the sur­veil­lance of the Ham­burg cell was in place became head of the BND in 2005!–D.E.]

Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, the sur­veil­lance was in place on Aug. 29, 1998, when Mr. Motas­sadeq and Mohamed Hay­dar Zam­mar, who had already been iden­ti­fied by police as a sus­pected extrem­ist, met at the Ham­burg home of Said Baha­ji. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s] The police mon­i­tored sev­eral oth­er meet­ings between the men in the months that fol­lowed, the doc­u­ments said. The record of the meet­ing shows that police had iden­ti­fied Mr. Baha­ji, anoth­er per­son sus­pected of being a cell mem­ber and believed to have been inti­mately involved in the plan­ning and logis­tics of the plot, who fled to Pak­istan days before the attacks. Mr. Baha­ji lat­er moved in with Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the now-infa­mous apart­ment at 54 Marien­strasse in the Har­burg sec­tion of Ham­burg. [There are pro­found indi­ca­tions of a link between Mohamed Atta and the BND–D.E.]. . .

“Europe Mulls Sanc­tions Against U.S. over Spy­ing” by Frank Jor­dans and Cia­ran Giles [AP]; Ohio.com; 10/28/2013.

. . . . As pos­si­ble lever­age, Ger­man author­i­ties cit­ed last wek’s non-bind­ing res­o­lu­tion by the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment to sus­pend a post‑9/11 agree­ment allow­ing the Amer­i­cans access to bank trans­fer data to track the flow of ter­ror­ist mon­ey.

Ger­man Jus­tice Min­is­ter Sabine Leutheuss­er-Schmar­ren­berg­er said Mon­day she believed the Amer­i­cans were using the infor­ma­tion to gath­er eco­nom­ic intel­li­gence apart from teror­ism and that the deal, pop­u­lar­ly known as the SWIFT agree­ment, should be sus­pend­ed.

That would rep­re­sent a sharp rebuke to the Unit­ed States from some of its clos­est part­ners. . . .

Mohamed Atta; Wikipedia.

. . . . In 1990, Atta grad­u­at­ed with a degree in architecture,[15] and joined the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-affil­i­at­ed Engi­neers Syn­di­cate organization.[8] For sev­er­al months after grad­u­at­ing, Atta worked at the Urban Devel­op­ment Cen­ter in Cairo, where he worked on archi­tec­tur­al, plan­ning, and build­ing design.[16] In 1990, Atta’s fam­i­ly moved into an 11th floor apart­ment in Giza.[15][17]

Upon grad­u­at­ing from Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty, Atta’s marks were aver­age and insuf­fi­cient to be accept­ed into the Uni­ver­si­ty’s grad­u­ate pro­gram. His father insist­ed he go abroad for grad­u­ate stud­ies, and had Atta enroll in a Ger­man lan­guage pro­gram at the Goethe Insti­tute in Cairo.[18] [Ital­ics added.] In 1992, Atta’s father invit­ed a Ger­man cou­ple over for din­ner while they were vis­it­ing Cairo. The Ger­man cou­ple ran an exchange pro­gram between Ger­many and Egypt, and sug­gest­ed that Atta con­tin­ue his stud­ies in Ger­many. They offered him a tem­po­rary place to live at their house in the city. Mohamed Atta end­ed up in Ger­many two weeks lat­er, in July 1992. . . .

Inside Wik­iLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dan­ger­ous Web­site by Daniel Dom­scheit-Berg; Eng­lish trans­la­tion copy­right 2011 by Crown Pub­lish­ers [Ran­dom House imprint]; ISBN 978–0‑307–95191‑5; p. 58.

. . . . Using the WikiScan­ner, one can trace what changes have been made to Wikip­dia entries from any giv­en IP address. Employ­ees of the BND had made changes to the entries on mil­i­tary air­craft, nuclear weapons and the BND itself.

 Even more amus­ing were the “cor­rec­tions” made to the entries made to the entries on the Goethe Insti­tute,  the Ger­man government’s pre­mier insti­tu­tion for pro­mot­ing Ger­man lan­guage and cul­ture around the world. Orig­i­nal­ly, the entry had stat­ed that many Goethe Insti­tute offices had served as unof­fi­cial points of con­tact by the BND. BND employ­ees had altered it to say the exact oppo­site: “For­eign branch­es of the Goethe Insti­tute are not used as unof­fi­cial homes for the BND.” . . .   

“His­to­ry of the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety”

In the 1920’s, Carl Duis­berg, Gen­er­al Direc­tor of Bay­er AG in Ger­many, envi­sioned send­ing Ger­man stu­dents to the Unit­ed States on work-study pro­grams. Duis­berg was con­vinced that inter­na­tion­al prac­ti­cal train­ing was crit­i­cal to the growth of Ger­man indus­try. Many of the return­ing trainees lat­er rose to promi­nent posi­tions at AEG, Bay­er, Bosch, Daim­ler Benz, and Siemens, bring­ing with them new meth­ods for mass pro­duc­tion, new ideas, and new busi­ness prac­tices. Fol­low­ing World War II, alum­ni from the first exchanges found­ed the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft (CDG) in 1949 to help engi­neers, busi­ness­men and farm­ers gain inter­na­tion­al work expe­ri­ence nec­es­sary for the rebuild­ing of Ger­many . . . .

Excerpt from the Descrip­tion for FTR #484

. . . . Daniel also notes that some of Atta’s Ger­man asso­ciates in Flori­da were sons and daugh­ters of promi­nent Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists. . . .

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Man­ning; p. 292.

. . . A for­mer CIA con­tract pilot, who once flew the run into Paraguay and Argenti­na to the Bor­mann ranch described the estate as remote, ‘worth your life unless you entered their air space with the right iden­ti­fi­ca­tion codes. . . .

Wel­come to Ter­ror­land: Mohamed Atta & the 9–11 Cov­er-Up in Flori­da by Daniel Hop­sick­er; Mad­cow Press [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Daniel Hop­sick­er; ISBN 0–9706591‑6–4;. p. 178. Be sure to vis­it Daniel’s web­site for order­ing infor­ma­tion about this book.

. . . Swiss police ques­tioned Yeslam [bin Laden] because one of his com­pa­nies, Avcon Air Char­ter, had offered flight train­ing to clients at the Venice flight school attend­ed by some of the hijack­ers. As a result of what Le Monde called ‘a still unex­plained coin­ci­dence,’ the pilots of Yeslam bin Laden’s com­pa­ny trained at Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Flori­da, the paper stat­ed. ‘I didn’t chose that flight school,’ Yeslam protest­ed. ‘I don’t have con­tact with my half-broth­er since over 20 years ago.’ . . .

In the Name of Osama Bin Laden; by Roland Jacquard; Copy­right 2002 [SC]; Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Press; ISBN 0–8223-2991–3; pp. 17–18.

. . .This com­pa­ny, estab­lished by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flag­ship for the group’s activ­i­ties in Europe. It is head­ed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of direc­tors is made up almost exclu­sive­ly of mem­bers of the fam­i­ly clan, except for a Swiss cit­i­zen, Bau­doin Dunand. This well-known lawyer from French-speak­ing Switzer­land, who is on the boards of sev­er­al dozen com­pa­nies, came to pub­lic notice in 1983 when he agreed to rep­re­sent the Swiss banker Fran­cois Genoud, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure who had been a dis­ci­ple of Hitler and sole heir of Goebbels’s copy­rights before becom­ing one of the financiers of the FLN dur­ing the Alger­ian War. The friend­ships of the bin Ladens some­times seem sur­pris­ing, but they are log­i­cal: Fran­cois Genoud has always been pro-Arab. . . .

“Insid­ergeschäfte vor den Ter­ro­ran­schlä­gen in den USA? [Insid­er Trad­ing Pri­or to the Ter­ror Attacks in the US?]: Spec­u­lat­ing on Terror—Who Prof­it­ed from the Attacks?” by Rolf Bovi­er & Pierre Matthias; Bay­erische Rund­funk Online (BR-Online); 9/25/2001.

. . . . Finan­cial expert Ernest Back­es of Lux­em­bourg has [stud­ied] white-col­lar crime in the field of bank­ing for many years. Accord­ing to him, there are indi­ca­tions of unusu­al trans­ac­tions with which the groups [asso­ci­at­ed with] bin Laden could have earned mon­ey. ‘You can, for exam­ple, exam­ine whether, with­in a cer­tain time peri­od there’s been an attack against the secu­ri­ties of a giv­en air­line com­pa­ny. Since these secu­ri­ties are safe in a ‘clear­ing sys­tem,’ you can’t get an over­all view, who the own­er was at a giv­en time.’ . . . Accord­ing to Back­es’ infor­ma­tion, the trail leads to Switzer­land, to the accounts of an orga­ni­za­tion that was found­ed by the late lawyer Fran­cois Genoud and evi­dent­ly still sur­vives. Says Back­es, ‘One of the grounds for accu­sa­tion is that this Swiss attor­ney had the clos­est con­nec­tions with the Bin Laden fam­i­ly, that he was an advi­sor to the fam­i­ly, one of its invest­ment bankers. It’s known for cer­tain, that he sup­port­ed ter­ror­ism and was the estate execu­tor for Hitler and part of the ter­ror milieu.’ [Empha­sis added.]”

“Bank­ing with Bin Laden” by Lucy Komis­ar [side­bar to “Explo­sive Rev­e­la­tion$”]; In These Times; 3/15/2002.

. . . .In Novem­ber, U.S. author­i­ties named some banks that had bin Laden accounts, and it put them on a black­list. One was Al Taqwa, ‘Fear of God,’ reg­is­tered in the Bahamas with offices in Lugano, Switzer­land. Al Taqwa had access to the Clearstream sys­tem through its cor­re­spon­dent account with the Ban­ca del Got­tar­do in Lugano, which has a pub­lished Clearstream account (No. 74381). But Bin Laden may have oth­er access to the unpub­lished sys­tem. In what he calls a ‘spec­tac­u­lar dis­cov­ery,’ Ernest Back­es reports that in the weeks before CEO Andre Lus­si was forced to leave Clearstream last May, a series of 16 unpub­lished accounts were opened under the name of the Sau­di Invest­ment Com­pa­ny, or SICO, the Gene­va hold­ing com­pa­ny of the Sau­di Bin­laden Group, which is run by Osama’s broth­er Yeslam Bin­laden (some fam­i­ly mem­bers spell the name dif­fer­ent­ly.) Yeslam Bin­laden insists that he has noth­ing to do with his broth­er, but evi­dence sug­gests SICO is tied into Osama’s finan­cial net­work. [Empha­sis added.] SICO is asso­ci­at­ed with Dar Al-Maal-Al-Isla­mi (DMI), an Islam­ic finan­cial insti­tu­tion also based in Gene­va and presided over by Prince Muhammed Al Faisal Al Saoud, a cousin of Sau­di King Fahd, that directs mil­lions a year to fun­da­men­tal­ist move­ments. DMI holds a share of the Al Shamal Islam­ic Bank of Sudan, which was set up in 1991 and part­ly financed by $50 mil­lion from Osama bin Laden. Fur­ther­more, one of SICO’s admin­is­tra­tors, Gene­va attor­ney Bau­doin Dunand, is a part­ner in a law firm, Magnin Dunand & Part­ners, that set up the Swiss finan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny SBA, a sub­sidiary of the SBA Bank in Paris, which is con­trolled by the bin Mah­fouz fam­i­ly.”

“World Brief­ing | Europe: Report On U.S. Spy Sys­tem” by Suzanne Daley; The New York Times; 9/6/2001.

[Notice when this was published–9/6/2001.–D.E.] . . . The Unit­ed States-led spy­ing sys­tem known as Ech­e­lon can mon­i­tor vir­tu­al­ly every com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the world — by e‑mail, phone or fax — that bounces off a satel­lite, the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment was told. But in report­ing on a year­long study of the sys­tem that was prompt­ed by con­cern that Amer­i­can com­pa­nies were using data from the sys­tem to gain a com­pet­i­tive edge, Ger­hard Schmid, a Ger­man mem­ber of the Par­lia­ment, said that many Euro­pean coun­tries had sim­i­lar abil­i­ties . . .

UPDATE: Angela Merkel has pro­posed an EU-wide com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem to guard against NSA and GCHQ spy­ing, while ramp­ing up spy­ing against the U.S.

“Sur­veil­lance Rev­e­la­tions: Angela Merkel Pro­pos­es Euro­pean Net­work to Beat NSA and GCHQ Spy­ing” by Tony Pat­ter­son; The Inde­pen­dent [UK]; 2/16/2014.

Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel of Ger­many has announced plans to set up a Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work as part of a broad counter-espi­onage offen­sive designed to curb mass sur­veil­lance con­duct­ed by the US Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency and its British coun­ter­part, GCHQ. . . .

. . . . Announc­ing the project in her week­ly pod­cast, Ms Merkel said she envis­aged set­ting up a Euro­pean com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work which would offer pro­tec­tion from NSA sur­veil­lance by side-step­ping the cur­rent arrange­ment where­by emails and oth­er inter­net data auto­mat­i­cal­ly pass through the Unit­ed States.

The NSA’s Ger­man phone and inter­net sur­veil­lance oper­a­tion is report­ed to be one of the biggest in the EU. In co-oper­a­tion with GCHQ it has direct access to under­sea cables car­ry­ing transat­lantic com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Europe and the US.

Ms Merkel said she planned to dis­cuss the project with the French Pres­i­dent, François Hol­lande, when she meets him in Paris on Wednes­day. “Above all we’ll talk about Euro­pean providers that offer secu­ri­ty to our cit­i­zens, so that one shouldn’t have to send emails and oth­er infor­ma­tion across the Atlantic,” she said. “Rather one could build up a com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work inside Europe.”

French gov­ern­ment offi­cials respond­ed by say­ing Paris intend­ed to “take up” the Ger­man ini­tia­tive.

Ms Merkel’s pro­pos­als appear to be part of a wider Ger­man counter-espi­onage offen­sive, report­ed to be under way in sev­er­al of Germany’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, against NSA and GCHQ sur­veil­lance.

Der Spiegel mag­a­zine said on Sun­day that it had obtained infor­ma­tion about plans by Germany’s main domes­tic intel­li­gence agency, the Fed­er­al Office for the Pro­tec­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion, for a “mas­sive” increase in counter-espi­onage mea­sures.

The mag­a­zine said there were plans to sub­ject both the Amer­i­can and British Embassies in Berlin to sur­veil­lance. It said the mea­sures would include obtain­ing exact details about intel­li­gence agents who were accred­it­ed as diplo­mats, and infor­ma­tion about the tech­nol­o­gy being used with­in the embassies. . . .