November 22, 1984, AP - Schenectady Gazette, page B18, Crop Dusting in Blood of Pilot, 73, by Henry S. Ackerman, Associated Press Writer,
July 1, 1993, Orlando Sentinel, Born to fly; Pilot Battles Bugs, Gravity, A Changing Profession, by Patricia Caporale of The Sentinel Staff,
September 20, 2001, Sydney Morning Herald, Jet crash on stadium was Olympics nightmare, by Jacquelin Magnay, diigo,
September 22, 2001, Time Magazine, Cropduster Manual Discovered; Sources tell TIME that U.S. officials suspect that bin Laden conspirators may have been planning to disperse biological or chemical agents from cropdusting planes, by Massimo Calabresi and Sally Donnelly,
September 23, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Crop-Dusting Manual Found, Time Reports,
September 23, 2001 [07:36 PM EDT] CNN, FBI imposes new restrictions on crop-dusters,
September 24, 2001, Reuters - Rense, FBI Grounds All US Crop-Dusting Planes,
September 24, 2001, Washington Post - The Toledo Blade, page A6, 'Serious threat' grounds crop dusters; Planes could be used in chemical, bio-attacks,
September 24, 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Crop dusting is banned after investigators find manual, by Lenny Savino and David Goldstein, Inquirer Washington Bureau,
September 24, 2001, New Scientist, Airborne biological weapon attacks are serious concern, by Ian Sample,
September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder - Lawrence Journal-World, page 2A, Crop-dusting flights banned again; Manual found in terrorist hideout; hijacker inquired about planes,
September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder - Orlando Sentinel, Crop-dusting Banned Again After New Find, by Lenny Savino and David Goldstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers,
September 24 2001, Sun-Sentinel, Crop-duster Inquiries Draw Attention Of FBI, by Scott Travis, diigo,
September 24, 2001, The Miami Herald - The Houston Chronicle, Hijacker suspect showed interest in crop-dusters, by Paul Brinkley-Rogers, diigo,
September 24, 2001, AP - The Michigan Daily, First suspect charged for aiding attacks,
September 24, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, Atta checked out crop-dusters at Fla. airport; Mohamed Atta, suspected of crashing a jet into the trade center, asked detailed questions about chemical-spraying planes, Compiled from Times wires,
September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder Newspaper - The Gainesville Sun, page 3A, Atta looked at crop-dusters, by Paul Brinkley-Rogers, Alfonso Chardy and Sara Olkon,
September 24, 2001, ABC News, Hijacker Visited Crop-Duster Airfield, Archived,
September 24, 2001, AP - Athens Banner-Herald, Crop dusters grounded Sunday by FBI out of 'abundance of caution', by Pete Yost,.Associated Press,
September 24, 2001, Time Magazine, The New Breed of Terrorist; An inside look at the lives of the men behind the attacks. Now dozens of their associates may be at large in the U.S. What will come next?, by Johanna McGeary and David van Biema,
September 25, 2001, The Seattle Times, Crop-duster ban to end; planes a potential terrorist weapon, by Lynda V. Mapes, Mike Carter and Duff Wilson,
September 25, 2001, Sydney Morning Herald, Crop-duster Ban Amid New Fears Of Deadly Rain,
September 25, 2001, AP - The St. Augustine Record, Terrorists may have shown interest in Florida crop-dusting aircraft, by Amanda Riddle, Associated Press Writer,
September 25, 2001, [5:02 AM EDT] AP, Probe Shines Light on Crop Dusters, by John Porretto, AP Business Writer,
September 25, 2001, Sarasota Herald-Tribune [Manatee] page 1, FBI suspect may have wanted to buy a crop-duster plane, by Rick Weiss and Justin Blum,
September 25, 2001, Washington Post, page A12, Suspect May Have Wanted to Buy Plane; Suspect inquired with US Dept. of Agriculture about buying a cropduster, by Rick Weiss and Justin Blum,
September 25, 2001, New York Times, Aviation Precautions: Crop-Dusters Are Grounded on Fears of Toxic Attacks, by Dana Canedy,
September 25, 2001, Fox News, Order Grounding Crop-Dusting Planes Expires,
September 25, 2001, Los Angeles Times, New Crop-Dusting Restrictions Weighed; Aircraft: Report that terrorists may have visited a company that flies the agricultural planes spurs concerns about chemical and biological weapons, by Aaron Zitner and John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writers,
September 25, 2001, The Topeka Capital-Journal, Crop-duster ban extended; Terrorism: Airborne chemical and biological attacks feared; Kansans in the industry vow to be 'vigilant', by Jonna Lorenz, Archived,
September 25, 2001, Orlando Sentinel, Crop-Dust Rules Likely To Tighten, by Dan Tracy, Sentinel Staff Writer,
September 25, 2001, The New Zealand Herald, FBI grounds crop dusters over fears of chemical attack on US cities, by Staff reporter and agencies,
September 25, 2001, Reuters, Risks crop-duster planes to attack Europe seen low, by David Brough,
September 25, 2001, The Irish Times, Suspect tried to buy crop-duster - reports,
September 25, 2001, The New Paper, FBI grounds crop-dusters; US fears bio-terrorism may be the next threat, by Eugene Wee, Singapore Press Holdings,September 26, 2001, Daily Post (Liverpool) Terrorists Tried to Buy Plane for Chemical Attack,
September 26, 2001, The Birmingham Post (England) War on Terror: Hijackers Tried to Get Loan for Crop Planes,
September 27, 2001, Sun-Sentinel, State Sets Crop-dusting Rules, by Kathy Bushouse, Staff Writer,
September 28, 2001, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, page A1, Hijacker with cold stare hated mission of blending in, by Chris Davis, diigo,
October 5, 2001, New York Times, Filipinos Recall Hijack Suspects Leading a High Life, by Don Kirk,
October 15, 2001, Agence France-Presse, Publisher's wife rented out apartment to two suspected hijackers: report,
October 15, 2001, The Miami Herald, New link in Boca anthrax case; Terror suspects rented from editor's wife, by Alfonso Chardy, Wanda J. DeMarzo and Ronnie Greene, Archived, diigo,
October 21, 2001, Newsday, Another Hijacker? Investigators focus on arrested flight student's links, by John Riley,
November 8, 2001 [1st capture] BBC News, Anthrax Fact File: Dispersing Anthrax,
November 17, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at ’96 Olympics; Safety: Crop-dusters and jets within hundreds of miles of the Atlanta Games were tracked, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak,
November 17, 2001, Orlando Sentinel, U.S. Prepared For Attacks From Air In '96 Olympics, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak, Washington bureau,
November 19, 2001, The Wall Street Journal, Hijackers' Interest in Crop Dusters Still Puzzles Terrorism Investigators, by John J. Fialka, Tom Hamburger and Gary Fields, Staff Reporters,
February 20, 2002, The Southeast Missourian, No Anthrax Threat; Crop-dusters ready to return to skies, preparing equipment for season, by Scott Welton, Standard Democrat,
April 4, 2002, USA Today, Growing season signals caution, by Patrick O'Driscoll, diigo,
February 13, 2003, The Salem News, FBI probes bid to buy crop-duster, by Marc Fortier and Jill Harmacinski, Staff Writers, diigo,
August 21, 2009, Lemars Daily Sentinel [Iowa] Working at 180 mph: Crop duster tells his story, by Magdalene Landegent,
May 15, 2015, New York Post, Colombia bans cocaine-killing crop dusters over health fears,
A "Crop Duster's Manual"
92 pages, $24.99 at Amazon
How to Land a Top-Paying Aerial crop dusters Job: Your Complete Guide to Opportunities, Resumes and Cover Letters, Interviews, Salaries, Promotions, What to Expect From Recruiters and More Paperback – April 2, 2012, by Christine Sherman (Author)
Aerial Applicator's Manual,
A national Pesticide applicator certification study Guide
Published by the National Association of State Departments
of Agriculture Research Foundation
Written By
Patrick J. O'Connor-Marer, PhD
http://www.nasda.org/File.aspx?id=3786
2013
134 pages. First appearance online, Sept. 22, 2013, Calls itself both a "manual" and a "certification study guide." Very unusual typography and cover design.
"Ag Aviators prohibited to fly on Sunday 23,"
Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest...
September 24, 2001, Reuters - Rense, FBI Grounds All US Crop-Dusting Planes,
Crop-Dusting Planes
|
___________________________________________________________________________
November 22, 1984, AP - Schenectady Gazette, page B18, Crop Dusting in Blood of Pilot, 73, by Henry S. Ackerman, Associated Press Writer,
________________________________________________________________________________
July 1, 1993, Orlando Sentinel, Born to fly; Pilot Battles Bugs, Gravity, A Changing Profession, by Patricia Caporale of The Sentinel Staff,
GENEVA — He's up. He's down. He takes a go-around. Pushed back into his seat with three to four times the force of gravity, Tom Summersill's eyes bulge, his throat dries and his chest constricts like it's about to be introduced to his backbone.
For the 66-year-old Geneva pilot, one of three generations of crop dusters clinging to a changing profession, it's all in a day's work.
Swooping down from 200 feet in the air to just a few feet above the ground, the powerful Ag-Cat's 600 horsepower Pratt and Whitney nine-cylinder radial engine rumbles like an AT-6 flying hard in an air race.
Liquid spews precisely from the 400-gallon hopper into a sprayer and onto the foliage below, launching another battle of the bugs for A. Duda and Sons Inc. Then it's up again, hard and fast, for a wide swing and a pass at the next patch of vegetables growing in the rich soil of Belle Glade.
The 170-mile commute from Duda's expanse of land in Belle Glade to Summersill's home in Geneva isn't all that bad - as the crow flies.
Summersill started flying the route five days a week in 1962, when he signed on to service Duda's crops full time. The commute had no traffic jams, no speed limits; Summersill would simply climb into his twin-engine Cessna at the Sanford airport and fly south.
Like so many early crop dusters, who now are called aerial applicators, Summersill had spent his early years chasing seasons and crops from Florida to the Carolinas, Georgia and Kentucky. ''We were just like migrant farm workers,'' he said. ''We followed the crops.''
And like the early barnstormers, he would fly into a farmer's field and look for work dusting for bugs or fertilizing. Eventually, he developed a circuit of sorts. He flew the plane to the job while his wife, Hazel, drove the kids and the cat in the family car to a seasonal rental home.
When the children got older and needed to stay put more often, Summersill said he made his deal with A. Duda and Sons. His company, Thomas R. Summersill Airplane Spraying, has worked for the vegetable grower exclusively ever since.
It was a barnstorming pilot who landed at Sanford airport one summer afternoon and gave Summersill his first ride at the age of 7 in a Ford Tri-Motor. ''From that point on I knew I was born to fly.''
He took son Thomas J. on his first airplane ride in a Boeing 247 when the boy was only six months old. Grandson Jeffrey was the same age when he took his first flight in a Cessna 182.
Family has always been a big part of Summersill's life and his business. From early on, Hazel and his daughter, Louann, helped keep the books and records. As soon as Thomas J. obtained a commercial license, he told the family he wanted to get into the business with them. Now Summersill's grandson is ready to sign on as well.
''We never tried to force them. They came to us and said they wanted to be part of the family business,'' Summersill said with a smile. ''Our grandson just got his commercial license and now we're training him to be an aerial applicator. Three generations. It's all in the family.''
Today, the older Summersill remains on staff as a consultant. He occasionally flies, but for the most part he has turned operations over to his son and grandson. Hazel still helps with the books, but Louann is busy being a mom to two daughters and teaching at Geneva Elementary School.
In a business that changes every day, Summersill said his success can be attributed to hard work and flexibility. In addition to keeping their licenses current, his aviators keep up with the latest chemical information, and state and federal environmental regulations.
Summersill says his company's future remains bright. ''Flying has been nothing but good to us,'' he said. ''But you have to be more than a businessman. You have to love it and you have to be responsible.
''Most applicators are well aware that safety is the number one consideration,'' Summersill said. ''At no time would any responsible ag operator do anything to jeopardize the safety of the people and things in the environment around them.''
Responsibility starts on the ground. ''We log every ounce of chemical, how it was mixed, where it goes, when and what the weather conditions are at the time. Fifty years from now there will be no mystery about what is beneath the soil. It's all on record,'' said Summersill.
And, he hopes another generation of flying Summersills will continue the log.
_________________________________________________________________________________
September 20, 2001, Sydney Morning Herald, Jet crash on stadium was Olympics nightmare, by Jacquelin Magnay, diigo,
Jet Crash On Stadium Was Olympics Nightmare
by Jacquelin Magnay
The Sydney Morning Herald
September 20, 2001
http://old.smh.com.au/news/0109/20/world/world20.html
A fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience at the Sydney Olympics was one of the greatest security fears for the Games, the Olympic Security Commander, former chief superintendent Paul McKinnon, says.
Mr McKinnon said that Osama bin Laden had been the number one threat.
The combined security forces had also prepared for marine hijackings or a hijacked plane smashing into the central business district.
Mr McKinnon said there was a constant aviation security overlay during the Games if a hijacked or wayward plane strayed into restricted airspace.
"We did not have the authority to shoot at it, but the plan was to run something in its path and we had a collection of aircraft in the sky at any time ready for that.
The International Olympic Committee reaffirmed yesterday that the 2002 Winter Olympic Games would be held in Salt Lake City next February. Salt Lake City is spending $US200 million ($400 million) on security.
IOC officials said the scenario of a plane crash during the opening ceremony was uppermost in their security planning at every Olympics since terrorists struck in Munich in 1972.
"In our own assumptions for every Games, regardless of the tragedy of September 11, the scenario catastrophe has always been incorporated," the IOC director-general, Mr FranÇois Carrard, said.
Mr Carrard said the format for Games security has not changed but it would be reviewed. The IOC has decided to hire independent security consultants to assess risks and give continuous advice.
The IOC is also looking at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games security, which is to cost $US600 million and involve the co-operation of seven countries.
The Olympics faces constant threats from the local terrorist organisation, November 17, which has killed 22 people since 1975.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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September 22, 2001, Time Magazine, Cropduster Manual Discovered; Sources tell TIME that U.S. officials suspect that bin Laden conspirators may have been planning to disperse biological or chemical agents from cropdusting planes, by Massimo Calabresi and Sally Donnelly,
Saturday, Sep. 22, 2001 New York -- U.S. law enforcement officials have found a manual on the operation of cropdusting equipment while searching suspected terrorist hideouts, government sources tell TIME magazine in an issue out on Monday, Sept. 24th.
The discovery has added to concerns among government counterterrorism experts that the bin Laden conspirators may have been planning — or may still be planning —to disperse biological or chemical agents from a cropdusting plane normally used for agricultural purposes.
Among the belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, sources tell TIME, were manuals showing how to operate cropdusting equipment that could be used to spray fast-killing toxins into the air.
The discovery resulted in the grounding of all cropdusters nationwide on Sunday Sept. 16th. The dusters have been allowed back up, but are not allowed to take off or land from what traffic controllers refer to as Class B airspace, or the skies around major cities.
One senior official cautions that because corroborative evidence is lacking the FBI does not place "high credibility" in the notion that the hijackers were in fact exploring the idea of stealing or renting cropdusters. However, the FBI is advising members of a crop-dusters' group to report any suspicious buys of dangerous chemicals in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks.
Last week, the National Agricultural Aviation Association, a crop dusters trade group, posted a message from the FBI to its membership: "Members should be vigilant to any suspicious activity relative to the use, training in or acquisition of dangerous chemicals or airborne application of same including threats, unusual purchases, suspicious behavior by employees or customers, and unusual contacts with the public. Members should report any suspicious circumstances or information to local FBI offices."
— With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington
_______________________________________________________________________________
September 23, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Crop-Dusting Manual Found, Time Reports,
Time magazine reported that investigators had found a crop-dusting manual during a search for those responsible for the terrorist attacks, triggering concern that crop-dusting planes might be used for chemical or biological assaults.
The FBI in Washington said it had not seen the report and had no comment on it.
The magazine said its issue due out Monday would disclose that a manual for crop-dusting equipment had been found during a search of the suspected hide-outs of some of those believed responsible for the attacks.
______________________________________________________________________________
September 23, 2001 [07:36 PM EDT] CNN, FBI imposes new restrictions on crop-dusters,
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI has limited the use of crop-dusters amid concerns that suspected terrorists might have been plotting to use the aircraft for another attack, possibly chemical or biological, according to law enforcement sources.
The FBI grew alarmed about crop-dusters after a crop-dusting manual was discovered among the belongings of a man being held as a material witness in the investigation into the September 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested last month in Minnesota on an alleged passport violation. Moussaoui was in custody at the time of the attacks.
Moussaoui apparently had raised suspicions because he sought training in flying commercial jets at flights schools in Oklahoma and Minnesota but showed no interest in learning about takeoffs or landings.
Last week, the FBI imposed a ban on crop-dusting but has since modified it to keep crop-dusters away from metropolitan areas.
The National Agricultural Aviation Association posted the following statement on its Web page, saying it had come from the FBI:
"Members should be vigilant to any suspicious activity relative to the use, training in or acquisition of dangerous chemicals or airborne application of same, including threats, unusual purchases, suspicious behavior by employees or customers and unusual contacts with the public. Members should report any suspicious circumstances or information to local FBI offices."
The statement added that agricultural aviators were allowed to fly except near major metro areas.
In Belle Glade, Florida, crop-duster mechanic James Lester said he believes that Mohamed Atta, one of the suspected hijackers who slammed a plane into the World Trade Center's north tower, had come out to the airstrip twice, along with other men he described as "Arab-looking."
"They wanted to know (the) capacity of the airplane, how much would the airplane hold, how much fuel and how to crank it," he said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would not rule out the possibility that terrorists were planning another attack, using chemical or biological weapons.
"We can't know that for certain. We can suspect it," Rumsfeld said on CBS' "Face the Nation" program.
He noted that several countries the United States views as terror sponsors "have very active chemical and biological warfare programs. And we know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world."
For its part, the FBI refused to comment specifically on its focus on crop-dusters.
"In an abundance of caution, the FBI has taken a number of steps in reaction to every bit of information and threats received during the course of this investigation," an FBI statement said.
_______________________________________________________________________________
September 24, 2001, Washington Post - The Toledo Blade, page A6, 'Serious threat' grounds crop dusters; Planes could be used in chemical, bio-attacks,
_______________________________________________________________________________
September 24, 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Crop dusting is banned after investigators find manual, by Lenny Savino and David Goldstein, Inquirer Washington Bureau,
WASHINGTON — FBI and Federal Aviation Administration officials banned crop-dusting flights yesterday amid reports that a crop-dusting manual had been found in the search of a possible terrorist hideout.
In addition, it was learned that suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta had twice visited an airport in Belle Glade, Fla., to ask detailed questions about how to fly a crop duster.
"He wanted to know how to fly it, how to crank it, how much it would haul," said James Lester, 50, who maintains and loads a 502 Air Tractor crop duster with as much as 500 gallons of insecticide and fertilizer.
Lester said he was interviewed by FBI agents last week. On Friday, an armed guard was posted at the Belle Glade airport.
An FBI spokesman confirmed the ban on crop dusters yesterday, saying it would last till midnight. But he declined to provide details of why the ban had been imposed.
Time magazine reports this week that federal officials feared the planes might be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld declined to confirm Time's report that the manual had been found in the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who is being held as a material witness in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Moussaoui was detained in Minnesota on Aug. 17 when his request for flight-simulation training aroused suspicions.
Rumsfeld said on CBS's Face the Nation that the threat of chemical or biological weapons should be taken seriously because of links between terrorist organizations and countries that are believed to be developing such weapons. Among them, some experts say, are Iraq, Iran and, possibly, Libya.
The FBI spokesman said the crop-duster ban had been taken "in an abundance of caution."
The FAA had included crop dusters in its grounding of all commercial and general aviation immediately after the terror attacks. The ban subsequently was lifted, reinstated, lifted again last week, and reinstated again yesterday at the request of the FBI.
"They had security concerns," FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said. "We thought it would be prudent to do this to prevent them from flying today. I can't go into detail."
Donna Lawrence, co-owner of Allin Lawrence Aerial Spraying in Eakly, Okla., said the FAA last week had been doing background checks on pilots and support crews at her facility.
"I think it's a reasonable response, considering there are a lot of crop-dusting planes across the United States," Lawrence told the Daily Oklahoman.
The ban on crop dusting is not the only limitation that the FAA has imposed on aircraft. Planes also are banned until further notice from flying over stadiums and other outdoor events. The FAA's Spitaliere said the "temporary flight restriction" had been imposed after the FAA began receiving requests from coordinators of large outdoor events, including the National Football league.
"We couldn't handle them all individually, so we did a blanket temporary flight restriction over all sporting events and areas where there was going to be a large gathering of people," she said.
As of yesterday, more than 155,000 tips had been received by the FBI - 75,367 through the FBI's Web site, 13,516 through the phone hotline, and 66,214 from FBI field offices, the FBI said.
Lenny Savino's e-mail address is lsavino@krwashington.com.
Knight Ridder correspondents Paul Brinkley-Rogers and Sara Olkon contributed to this article.
________________________________________________________________________________
September 24, 2001, New Scientist, Airborne biological weapon attacks are serious concern, by Ian Sample, [18:45]
Fears that terrorists may have planned to use crop-dusting aeroplanes to spray US cities with biological warfare agents need to be taken seriously, according to British experts. While such an attack would face technical difficulties, it could be extremely effective, they say.
"If you wanted to use biological weapons, one of the best ways is to use a crop duster," says Malcolm Dando, professor of international security at the University of Bradford. "It's not an unreal concern to have."
The spectre of a biological terrorist attack using crop-dusters arose on Sunday. Time magazine reported that the FBI had found a manual on crop-dusting among the belongings of one of the suspects for the World Trade Center attacks.
The FBI refused to confirm or deny the finding to New Scientist, but did order crop-dusters to be grounded on Monday. Crop-dusters were initially grounded on the 16 September, five days after the attacks on Washington DC and New York but the restriction was relaxed the next day in areas away from big cities.
The US National Agricultural Aviation Association website now carries a warning from the FBI urging members to report any suspicious interest in use of the planes. Crop-duster mechanics in Florida told CNN that a group of arab men had questioned them in August about the specifications of crop-dusters, including their carrying capacity.
Grab and grow
However, to carry out an effective attack, terrorists would first need to obtain and grow sufficient amounts of a virulent biological strain - most probably anthrax spores.
This is a significant task in itself, says Dando. Processing the spores so they distribute efficiently, get inhaled and remain in peoples' lungs long enough to cause an infection would also take expertise, he says.
Dando says the likelihood of such an attack is low, although the attack on the World Trade Center towers has changed how the risk of different attacks is assessed. "Before, the constraints on terrorism had a moral element, but that seems to have disappeared now," he says.
Night-time raid
The prospect of an anthrax attack was investigated in the 1990s by the US Office of Technological Assessment. They concluded that 100 kilograms of virulent anthrax effectively dispersed at night over Washington DC could cause between one and three million deaths. Crop-dusters can carry up to twice that capacity.
Dando says that the best way to reduce the threat is to prevent the proliferation of expertise in manufacturing chemical and biological weapons. This would involve an agreement among states to scrap their research programmes, he says.
"Once you get an agreement among most countries, you can focus your intelligence on those that don't sign up," he says.
_______________________________________________________________________________
September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder - Lawrence Journal-World, page 2A, Crop-dusting flights banned again; Manual found in terrorist hideout; hijacker inquired about planes,
September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder - Orlando Sentinel, Crop-dusting Banned Again After New Find, by Lenny Savino and David Goldstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers,
WASHINGTON -- FBI and Federal Aviation Administration officials banned crop-dusting flights Sunday amid reports that a crop-dusting manual had been found in the search of a possible terrorist hideout.
In addition, it was learned that suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta had twice visited an airport in Belle Glade to ask detailed questions about how to fly a crop-duster.
"He wanted to know how to fly it, how to crank it, how much it would haul," said James Lester, 50, who maintains and loads a 502 Air Tractor crop-duster with as much as 500 gallons of insecticide and fertilizer.
Lester told The Miami Herald he was interviewed by FBI agents last week. On Friday, an armed guard was posted at the Belle Glade airport.
An FBI spokesperson confirmed the ban on crop-dusters Sunday, saying it would last till midnight, but would not provide details of why the ban had been imposed.
Time magazine reports in its upcoming issue that federal officials feared the planes might be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would not confirm Time's report that the manual was in the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen held as a material witness in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Moussaoui was detained Aug. 17 in Minnesota when his request for flight-simulation training aroused suspicions.
Rumsfeld said on CBS' Face the Nation that the threat of chemical or biological weapons should be taken seriously because of links between terrorist countries and countries thought to be developing such weapons. Among them, some experts say, are Iraq, Iran and possibly Libya.
The FAA had included crop-dusters in its grounding of all commercial and general aviation immediately after the terror attacks. The ban subsequently was lifted, reinstated, lifted again last week and reinstated again Sunday at the request of the FBI.
Terra firma Applicator's Manual.
________________________________________________________________________________
September 24 2001, Sun-Sentinel, Crop-duster Inquiries Draw Attention Of FBI, by Scott Travis,
Hijacking suspect Mohamed Atta twice visited a Belle Glade airport to inquire about crop-dusting planes, and other Middle Eastern men asked how far the planes could travel and how much poison they could hold, crop-dusting company employees said on Sunday.
James Lester, who cleans and loads a crop-duster at the Belle Glade Municipal Airport, told the Sun-Sentinel that he believes he twice spotted Atta and several associates at the airstrip near Lake Okeechobee.
Willie Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care, a single-plane crop-dusting business at the airport, told the The Washington Post that groups of two or three Middle Eastern men came by almost every weekend for six or eight weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — including the weekend just before the assaults.
FBI agents visited the airport last week, Lester said. While Lester recognized the photo of Atta that agents showed him, Lee could not identify any of the men they were shown.
In addition to the visits by Atta and others to the Belle Glade airport, investigators discovered a manual on crop-dusters in the possession of Zacarias Moussouai, a man with alleged links to Osama bin Laden who was detained in August in Minnesota after he sought training at a flight school, The Washington Post reported.
The visits may have been what prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground crop-dusting planes until early today.
"We were asked, and we did this for reasons of national security. It was a one-day ban," FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said.
Lester said FBI agents interviewed people at the airport in northwest Palm Beach County last week, questioning him about encounters he may have had with Atta. Agents showed him a picture of Atta, which is when Lester concluded the man who had visited was indeed the suspected hijacker.
Lester said Atta stopped by the airport once in February and once in March with two other men who appeared to be Middle Eastern.
"They came by and wanted to know about airplanes, how to crank them, and they wanted to sit in the airplanes," he said.
Lester said he told the three men in February that he didn't have the authority to let them sit in the cockpit. He said he suggested they come back the next morning when his boss would be at work.
They didn't return the next day but showed up again in late March asking similar questions, Lester said. Again, they wanted to sit inside the crop-duster. Lester said he tried to brush them off during the second visit.
"I'd been working all day. It was hot, and I was getting the airplane cleaned up," Lester said. "I didn't want to be rude, but I just told them, 'You can't get in the cockpit of the airplane.'"
Lester said he didn't think there was anything suspicious about their visit or their inquiries.
"You've got people coming in and out of the airport all the time," he said. "When they see airplanes out flying and spraying, they're curious."
Lee, who works at the same airport, could not specifically identify any of the Middle Eastern men who stopped by repeatedly in the months before the terrorist attacks.
He said they described themselves as flight students, with several mentioning a South Florida flight school where investigators initially thought some of the hijackers might have trained.
"They pull in the gate there and get out and ask you all about the airplane," Lee told The Washington Post. "How much does it haul? How hard is it to fly? ... They would want to get up on the wing and look at it."
Lee said a small population of people from the Middle East lives in Belle Glade and the men's presence did not arouse his suspicion. He said he thinks the visits involved as many as 12 to 15 people who visited in groups of two or three. He said they stayed 45 minutes to an hour each visit.
Since the attacks, FBI agents have visited the airport eight or 10 times to ask questions, Lee said. The airport is under 24-hour police watch.
Bill Malone, who runs a crop-dusting business in Okeechobee County, said Sunday he was asked last week to turn over a list of all his crop-dusting pilots to the FAA. He said other companies have gotten similar requests.
Even if terrorists had access to such a plane, Malone said flying a crop-duster takes specialized training because of its many controls and lack of front wheels. There are just three schools in the country that teach crop-dusting, he said, and most of the about 3,500 family-owned planes nationwide are closely watched.
"It's tough to teach anyone how to fly them. And we just don't hire young pilots, because they're too inexperienced," he said.
Handling such planes is specialized and difficult enough that the FAA usually requires another crop-dusting pilot to vouch for new pilots' skills. Special FAA certification also is required.
"The FAA isn't even that familiar with our airplanes," he said.
James Callen, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, told The Washington Post that the nation's 4,000 crop-dusting planes, which also are used to combat fires and mosquitoes, commonly hold 300 to 800 gallons of chemicals. Crop-duster pilots must obtain small-plane commercial licenses and special training for agricultural aviation, Callen said.
Callen said the FBI and FAA have not informed the group of any specific reason for the grounding orders. He said there have been no confirmed reports of stolen planes or chemicals in recent weeks.
Staff Writer Buddy Nevins contributed to this report. Scott Travis can be reached at stravis@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6637.
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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September 24, 2001, The Miami Herald - The Houston Chronicle, Hijacker suspect showed interest in crop-dusters, by Paul Brinkley-Rogers, diigo,
Copyright 2001 The Miami Herald
BELLE GLADE, Fla. -- Mohamed Atta, the suspected terrorist who crashed hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, went twice to a small airport in South Florida and asked detailed questions about how to start and fly a crop-duster plane.
The news that Atta had shown an intense interest in crop-dusters coincided with a Federal Aviation Administration directive Sunday that grounded all crop-dusters around the country for national security reasons.
Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman, would not explain the specifics behind the decision. "It's national security," she said.
Bioterrorism experts have frequently cited crop-dusters as potential vehicles to disperse deadly biological and chemical agents. The experts have said that if terrorists acquired a crop-dusting plane, they could stage a surprise attack on a large urban area because the small planes can fly below the FAA's radar coverage.
In Belle Glade, local crop-dusters recounted Sunday what Atta asked about and speculated on how one of their planes could be used for a terrorist mission.
"Atta wanted to know how to fly it, how to crank it, how much it would haul," said James Lester, 50, who maintains and loads a 502 Air Tractor crop-duster with as much as 500 gallons of insecticide and fertilizer.
Lester said the 33-year-old Atta visited the small airstrip here with several groups of men as recently as last month.
J.D. "Will" Lee, 62, a pilot and owner of a gleaming yellow and blue crop-duster, added: "Not until after that bombing did I get to thinking that if you fill that aircraft with 500 gallons of gasoline -- plus 200 gallons of kerosene (used by the turboprop engine) -- that would have made one hell of a bomb."
The two men said they also realized the plane could have been loaded with some kind of biological warfare compound like anthrax or a lethal chemical. The airport is 83 miles northwest of Miami, and 67 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Palm Beach, Fla., is 40 miles to the east.
Lee and Lester said that right after the attacks on New York and Washington, they met at a cafe in Belle Glade. "We got to talking about how odd it was for that many Arabic people to come by," Lee said.
They called local police, who contacted the FBI.
Lee and Lester said they were interviewed by an FBI team on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. On Friday, Belle Glade Police and FBI agents slapped a 24-hour armed guard on the Belle Glade Municipal Airport -- home to about 15 light aircraft, including eight crop-dusters.
Belle Glade police said the FBI was at the airport on Sunday, too.
The FBI declined to comment on any phase of the investigation on Sunday.
Lester and Lee said that several other groups of Middle Eastern men had arrived at their small trailer within the last six to eight weeks to ask similar questions about their crop-duster.
Several crop-dusting services using identical Texas-made Air Tractors use the same airstrip to do contract spraying of millions of acres of farms around Lake Okeechobee.
Lee said he told Atta several times that "it takes considerable skill to fly these airplanes."
"A Cessna," he said, referring to the aircraft Atta flew, "is like riding a bicycle. An Air Tractor is like driving an oil tanker, or maybe a nuclear submarine."
He told the men the single-seater planes were not for rent.
"They would never have been able to fly this thing," Lee said. The idea that terrorists could use crop-dusters for biochemical attacks has been raised several times since the Sept. 11 hijackings.
The FAA's order is the second time in the last two weeks that the agency had specifically restricted any flights by crop-dusters. On Sept. 16, the FAA briefly grounded those kinds of planes after allowing most other commercial flights to resume.
Bergen, the FAA spokeswoman, said the restriction would be lifted today.
Appearing on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about a Time magazine story saying that U.S. law enforcement officials had found manuals on the operation of crop-dusting equipment while searching the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui.
Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota on Aug. 17 after a flight school instructor became suspicious about his request to learn how to steer a commercial jetliner -- but not how to land one.
On Face the Nation, Rumsfeld did not confirm whether the crop-dusting manual had been found, but noted that the threat of chemical or biological weapons was real because several countries suspected of harboring or sponsoring terrorism have tried to develop such weapons.
These countries, Rumsfeld said, "have very active chemical and biological warfare programs, and we know that they are in close contacts with terrorist networks around the world."
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September 24, 2001, AP - The Michigan Daily, First suspect charged for aiding attacks,
WASHINGTON (AP) Federal authorities have charged the first person with aiding the terrorist hijackers, according to court documents released yesterday. The number of people arrested or detained in the wide-ranging investigation grew to 352.
Herbert Villalobos was charged in federal court in suburban Virginia with aiding one of the suspected hijackers to fraudulently obtain a Virginia identification card a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.
A second man who aided with the I.D."s is cooperating and was not charged, prosecutors said. The court records disclosed as many as five of the hijackers got Virginia cards in the month before the attacks.
Meanwhile, the terrorism investigation proceeded on several fronts.
Attorney General John Ashcroft disclosed that 352 people have been arrested or detained in the investigation and an additional 392 people were being sought for questioning about the attacks in New York and Washington.
"We think they have information that could be helpful to the investigation," the attorney general told lawmakers.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded farm crop dusters another day for fear they could be used in a biological or chemical attacks a ban that was being lifted at midnight and also considered asking airports and airlines to take new precautions with their own workers.
The FAA said it was considering requiring that the workers" identifications be verified, followed by new checks of employment histories and possible criminal backgrounds.
The order on background checks would affect tens of thousands of airport workers who have access to secure locations in airports, people such as baggage handlers, food service workers and mechanics.
Initially, FAA officials said the order had been given. But late yesterday, the agency said it was still considering the idea and hadn"t formally acted. The agency has asked airports and airlines to make sure that identification badges used by employees with secure access are valid.
In Florida, court records in Broward County showed one of the 19 hijack suspects was wanted on an arrest warrant at the time of the attacks.
A bench warrant was issued June 4 for Mohamed Atta for failing to appear in court on a charge of driving without a license. Atta"s Florida driver"s license was revoked on Aug. 23.
"There"s over 200,000 warrants in the system," county sheriff"s spokeswoman Veda Coleman-Wright said. "So naturally, you're going to make sure you"re going out and getting those wanted for murder. This is not one that"s going to jump out at you."
In Virginia, an FBI affidavit filed in federal court alleged that as many as five hijackers Hani Hanjour, Salem Al-Hamzi, Majed Moqed, Ahmed Saleh Alghamdi and Abdulaziz Alomari went to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 2.
All five were at the office that day to "conduct transactions relating to Virginia identification cards," the affidavit said.
The affidavit alleges that Villalobos and a second man his identity not revealed because he is a confidential witness signed identity papers for the hijackers.
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September 24, 2001, St. Petersburg Times, Atta checked out crop-dusters at Fla. airport; Mohamed Atta, suspected of crashing a jet into the trade center, asked detailed questions about chemical-spraying planes, Compiled from Times wires
BELLE GLADE -- The first visit came in February, when three Middle Eastern men drove through the sugar-cane fields to the single-runway Belle Glade State Municipal Airport to ask about crop-dusters.
How many gallons of fuel can the planes hold? the group's leader asked. How many gallons of chemicals? How fast are they? Are they difficult to fly?
Over the next seven months, the casually dressed man returned to Belle Glade at least once, and other groups of Middle Eastern men visited many more times to quiz the airport staff about the intricacies of crop-dusters. The men often had video or still cameras, taking pictures of the aircraft and attempting to photograph the interiors.
An airport employee has since identified the first group's leader: He was Mohamed Atta, the suspected terrorist who crashed hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.
The news that Atta had shown an intense interest in crop-dusters coincided with a Federal Aviation Administration directive Sunday that grounded all crop-dusters around the country.
Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman, would not explain the specifics behind the decision. "It's national security," she said.
Bioterrorism experts have frequently cited crop-dusters as potential vehicles to disperse deadly biological and chemical agents. The experts have said that if terrorists acquired a crop-dusting plane, they could stage a surprise attack on a large urban area because the small planes can fly below the FAA's radar coverage.
In Belle Glade, local crop-dusters recounted Sunday what Atta asked about and speculated on how one of their planes could be used for a terrorist mission.
"Atta wanted to know how to fly it, how to crank it, how much it would haul," said James Lester, 50, who maintains and loads a 502 Air Tractor crop-duster with as much as 500 gallons of insecticide and fertilizer.
Lester said that Atta, 33, visited the small airstrip here with several groups of men as recently as last month.
J.D. "Will" Lee, 62, a pilot and owner of a gleaming yellow and blue crop-duster, added: "Not until after that bombing did I get to thinking that if you fill that aircraft with 500 gallons of gasoline -- plus 200 gallons of kerosene (used by the turboprop engine) -- that would have made one hell of a bomb."
The two men said they also realized the plane could have been loaded with some kind of biological warfare compound like anthrax or a lethal chemical.
The airport is about an hour's drive from Delray Beach, the coastal community where Atta and other alleged hijackers are thought to have lived.
Lee and Lester said that right after the attacks on New York and Washington, they met at a cafe in Belle Glade.
"We got to talking about how odd it was for that many Arabic people to come by," Lee said.
They called local police, who contacted the FBI.
Lee and Lester said they were interviewed by an FBI team on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. On Friday, Belle Glade police and FBI agents put a 24-hour armed guard on the Belle Glade Municipal Airport -- home to about 15 light aircraft, including eight crop-dusters.
Belle Glade police said the FBI was at the airport on Sunday, too.
The FBI declined to comment on any phase of the investigation on Sunday.
"The FBI showed me his (Atta's) photo," said Lester, who remembered at least two encounters with Atta -- once in March when he drove up in a green van with two other people, and again in August when he flew into the airport in a single-engine Cessna.
"The reason why I recognized him was because he was always walking behind me, being real persistent in asking those questions.
"It just amazes me now," said Lester, shaking his head.
Both Lester and Lee said that several other groups of Middle Eastern men had arrived at their small trailer within the past six to eight weeks to ask similar questions about their crop-duster.
The men seeking information arrived in cars and vans, and sometimes in light aircraft, to check out the crop-dusters. Lee said they described themselves as flight students.
Lee said he told Atta several times that it takes considerable skill to fly crop-dusters.
"They would never have been able to fly this thing," Lee said. "Without an expert pilot it would have never gotten off the ground with a full load. I told them when they asked how hard it was to fly, I said they wouldn't be able to do it."
James Callen, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, said the nation's 4,000 crop-dusting planes, which are also used to combat fires and mosquitoes, commonly hold 300 to 800 gallons of chemicals. Crop-duster pilots must obtain small-plane commercial licenses and special training for agricultural aviation, he said.
Callen said there have been no confirmed reports of stolen planes or chemicals in recent weeks.
The idea that terrorists could use crop-dusters for biochemical attacks has been raised several times since the Sept. 11 hijackings.
The FAA's order is the second time in the last two weeks that the agency had specifically restricted any flights by crop-dusters. On Sept. 16, the FAA briefly grounded those kind of planes after allowing most other commercial flights to resume. Bergen, the FAA spokeswoman, said the restriction would be lifted today.
Appearing on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about a Time magazine story saying that U.S. law enforcement officials had found manuals on the operation of crop-dusting equipment while searching the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui. The manuals showed "how to operate crop-dusting equipment that could be used to spray fast-killing toxins into the air," Time said.
Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota on Aug. 17 after a flight school instructor became suspicious about his request to learn how to steer a commercial jetliner -- but not how to land one.
On Face the Nation, Rumsfeld did not confirm whether the crop-dusting manual had been found, but noted the threat of chemical or biological weapons was real because several countries suspected of harboring or sponsoring terrorism have tried to develop such weapons.
These countries, Rumsfeld said, "have very active chemical and biological warfare programs and we know that they are in close contacts with terrorist networks around the world."
- Information from the Washington Post and Knight Ridder Newspapers was used in this report.
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September 24, 2001, Knight Ridder Newspaper - The Gainesville Sun, page 3A, Atta looked at crop-dusters, by Paul Brinkley-Rogers, Alfonso Chardy and Sara Olkon,
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September 24, 2001, ABC News, Hijacker Visited Crop-Duster Airfield, Archived,
WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 -- The man believed to have flown a hijacked passenger airliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center also wanted to get behind the controls of a crop-dusting plane, raising fears that terrorists may have been planning a chemical or biological attack.
Mohamed Atta, a suspected ringleader in the recent terror attacks in New York and Washington, made repeated visits to a crop-dusting airfield in Florida, according to Willie Lee, the chief pilot and general manager of South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade.
Lee identified Atta to the FBI, telling agents the suspected hijacker came to the airfield as recently as the Saturday before the Sept. 11 attacks, asking questions about the capabilities of crop-dusters, including how big a load of chemicals they could carry.
Atta was "very persistent about wanting to know how much the airplane will haul, how fast it will go, what kind of range it has," Lee told ABC NEWS.
"The guy kept trying to get in the airplane," Lee added, saying his ground crew chief had to order Atta away from one of the planes at one point because he kept trying to climb onto the wing and into the cockpit.
Lee said Atta and as many as 12 or 15 other men appearing to be of Middle Eastern descent visited the airfield in groups of two or three on several weekends prior to the attacks, often taking pictures of the aircraft.
• Crop-Dusters Grounded
"The FBI assesses the use of this type of aircraft to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction as potential threats to Americans," Attorney General John Ashcroft said during a congressional hearing on proposed anti-terrorism legislation today. "[But,] we have no clear indication of the time or place of such attacks."
Ashcroft said information about crop-dusting had been downloaded off the Internet by associates of the hijackers. And ABC NEWS has confirmed a manual for a crop-duster was found among the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been detained since August and is now under arrest as a material witness.
"Things like anthrax are easily transported, easily put into a solution that could be dispensed out of a crop-duster," says author and U.S. Navy Cmdr. Ward Carroll.
Fearing terrorists planned or may still plan to do just that, federal authorities grounded all crop-dusters — which can carry as much as 500 gallons of solution — on Sunday. The nationwide ban on agricultural flights ends at 12:05 a.m. local time on Tuesday.
Crop-dusting flights near major metropolitan areas have been prohibited since Sept. 11, when terrorists hijacked four passenger airliners, crashing three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers apparently tried to subdue the hijackers.
Check back for continuous updates on the hunt for terrorists from ABC NEWS' worldwide investigative team.
In other developments:
• Police Had Hijacker in Custody
ABCNEWS has learned the FBI increasingly believes Atta was the primary U.S. operative who oversaw and directed the deadly Sept. 11 attacks.
A senior law enforcement official told ABC NEWS Atta appears to be the "common denominator" in each of the four hijacking cells. The Egyptian national spent time in Florida, the Washington, D.C., area, Boston and Hamburg, Germany — all locations that have been the focus of intensive investigation.
ABC NEWS has also learned that Atta was in police custody five months before he and 18 other terrorists are believed to have carried out their attacks. Atta was stopped by police in Broward County, Fla., in April for driving without a license. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest when he failed to appear for court the following month.
• Four Material Witnesses Appear in San Diego Court
Four men described as "material witnesses" appeared in federal court in San Diego late this afternoon, for the beginning of a hearing that will continue on Tuesday.
The four were arrested over the weekend. Station KGTV in San Diego reported that Judge Reuben Brooks has placed a gag order on everyone involved and barred reporters from the courtroom on the grounds of "national security."
One man was unidentified since he is being held on an immigration violation. The other three are: Sam Awadallah, and Yazeed Al-Salmi both San Diego State students, and Mohdar Abdullah, a student at United States International University near San Diego.
An attorney said the men were cooperating voluntarily with the authorities.
• Possible Terrorist Truck Training Probed
The FBI is investigating why several men, now under arrest in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, were training to drive big rigs loaded with hazardous materials.
After authorities arrested Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan and Farouk Ali-Haimoud in Michigan last week on identity fraud charges, they were chilled to learn the men had attended truck-driving schools in the Detroit area.
FBI agents have interviewed the head of the U.S. Truck Driver Training School, who said Hannan and Koubriti had each taken four-week driving courses this summer. Koubriti failed his licensing exam at first, but passed it on a second try. Hannan never took the exam.
A fourth man — Nabil al-Marabh, 34, who was arrested while working the night shift at a liquor store outside Chicago — also learned to drive trucks in the Detroit area, getting a license to drive large trucks carrying hazardous materials after training at the A&K Driving School.
Al-Marabh was a Boston cab driver who moved freely first to Detroit and then Chicago, all at the same time he had been named in connection with the terrorist Osama bin Laden's plot to kill American tourists in Jordan.
The Department of Transportation has alerted the trucking industry to "be aware that numerous terrorist threats have been reported since Sept. 11, including unconfirmed reporting regarding potential use of chemical, biological, and/or radiological/nuclear [weapons of mass destruction]."
Warnings have also been issued to the petrochemical and nuclear power industries.
• 352 Arrested or Detained in FBI Manhunt
Ashcroft said today that 352 individuals have so far been arrested or detained by the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal, state and local law enforcement entities in a continuing nationwide manhunt for suspected terrorists and those with ties to the hijackers.
Authorities are still seeking to question as many as 392 others in connection with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, the attorney general said.
Other figures relating to the investigation include: 324 searches conducted 103 court orders issued 3,410 subpoenas issued 78,125 potential tips received on the FBI Web site 14,299 phone calls received on the FBI hotline
Two Virginia men have been charged with helping a number of the hijackers obtain driver's licenses.
Herbert Villalobos and an unnamed confidential witness are accused of falsely vouching for the terrorists when they applied for Virginia licenses last month, FBI officials said today.
State law requires applicants to provide two forms of identification or have a witness certify that he or she knows the applicant. The officials suggested the two men may not have known the hijackers, but routinely offered to sign such affidavits in exchange for a $100 fee.
Italian police arrested five Afghan men near the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican today and authorities in Belgium, Germany, France, Britain and the Netherlands made several arrests over the weekend.
Federal investigators believe up to 30 terrorist attacks may have been planned in the United States and Europe following the Sept. 11 assaults and that at least two planned attacks have been thwarted, including a bombing in Belgium and an attack by helicopter on the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
• The Case Against Bin Laden
The Bush administration is preparing to make public evidence directly linking bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to the Sept. 11 attacks and to other terrorist acts.
"There is a lot of classified information that leads to one person as well as one global terrorist organization," President Bush told reporters at the White House this morning.
"For those of you looking for a legal peg, we've already indicted Osama bin Laden," Bush added, referring to the indictment of the Saudi exile by U.S. courts for the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa. Bin Laden, who is based in Afghanistan, is also believed to be responsible for last year's bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
"More information is coming in with respect to his activities and the activities of his network," added Secretary of State Colin Powell. "As we look through it and we can find areas that are unclassified … it will allow us to share this information with the public."
Powell and other administration officials hope doing so will help win the support of Arab nations for a U.S.-led campaign against terrorist groups and their supporters.
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September 24, 2001, AP - Athens Banner-Herald, Crop dusters grounded Sunday by FBI out of 'abundance of caution', by Pete Yost, Associated Press,
WASHINGTON -- In a step stemming from the FBI's terrorist attack probe, the U.S. government Sunday grounded crop-dusting planes across the country for the day.
It was the second time that agricultural pilots have been told not to fly since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Responding to questions about the latest grounding, the FBI said that it was one of the steps the bureau has taken out of "an abundance of caution" and "in reaction to every bit of information and threats received during the course of this investigation."
James Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, said he got a call from a Federal Aviation Administration official about 8 o'clock Sunday morning.
"They said it was a national security issue," said Callan. "I made some calls and the indication was that there still is no specific threat, but the FBI apparently ordered this and they just want to make sure that everyone in the AG aviation industry is keeping their eyes and ears open."
FAA spokesman Scott Brenner said "the intelligence community came to us and encouraged us to shut down the crop dusters."
A notice on the crop dusters' Internet Web site stated, "Ag Aviators prohibited to fly on Sunday 23!"
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the potential threat on CBC's "Face The Nation," saying that countries sponsoring terrorism have "very active chemical and biological warfare programs."
"We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world," he said.
Crop dusters also were grounded Sept. 16 and for the past week have been barred from flying over metropolitan areas, with some exceptions. The crop dusters were grounded along with all other civilian aircraft after the attacks, with flights resuming Sept. 14.
Callan said there are probably about 3,500 agricultural aviators and that this is a crucial time of the year for aerial spraying of crops.
As the FBI's probe continued, agents in a Dallas suburb arrested a Palestinian whose name turned up in the address book of a former personal secretary to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Ghassan Dahduli is appealing an immigration court deportation ruling for obtaining a work visa through fraud, FBI spokeswoman Lori Bailey said. Dahduli's name surfaced in records introduced at this year's trial of Wadih el Hage, who worked as personal secretary to bin Laden.
El Hage and three other bin Laden associates were convicted of conspiring to murder Americans.
On the Web: National Agricultural Aviation Association: http://www.agaviation.org/
This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Monday, September 24, 2001.
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September 25, 2001, The Seattle Times, Crop-duster ban to end; planes a potential terrorist weapon, by Lynda V. Mapes, Mike Carter and Duff Wilson, Seattle Times staff reporters,
Corrected version
Crop-duster ban to end; planes a potential terrorist weapon
By Lynda V. Mapes , Mike Carter and Duff Wilson
Seattle Times staff reporters
Crop-dusters were scheduled to be back in the air today after a two-day shutdown by federal authorities.
A crop-duster would provide a crude but deadly delivery system for poisonous chemicals or biological agents, according to one senior terrorism official in Washington, D.C.
The official, who spoke yesterday on condition of anonymity, said law-enforcement officials reacted with alarm last week when they learned some of the men suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks on the East Coast may have visited crop-dusting companies in Florida and Texas.
Another suspected terrorist, identified as Zacarias Moussaoui, reportedly had a manual on the operation of crop-dusting equipment.
Inquired about loan
The Washington Post reported yesterday the man who the FBI says flew an American Airlines plane into the World Trade Center apparently walked into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Florida last year and asked about a loan to buy a crop-duster plane.
Employees told Mohamed Atta the department does not offer such loans, and referred him to a local private lender, according to a bank president whose security chief was briefed by the FBI. It appears Atta did visit that lender and made further inquiries about a loan, but there is no record that he applied for one, said Robert Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida.
The fear is that a terrorist would turn a normally benign piece of farm equipment into a weapon of mass destruction.
"This is a major concern," the official said. "Most people believe that there is a Plan B out there somewhere, and that it might involve" chemical, biological or radiological agents.
Credible threat
The terrorism official said the use of poisonous chemicals, rather than illness-causing biological infections, is seen as the most credible and serious threat. Osama bin Laden, identified by the Bush administration as the prime suspect in coordinating the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, reportedly has been seeking biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons for years.
The chief scientific officer for BioPort, the Michigan company that makes the military's vaccine for the deadly anthrax bacteria, said in a speech last January that a crop-duster would be an ideal method for delivering the spores.
"Once made, deadly anthrax can be disseminated with equipment as simple as crop-dusters, foggers — even aerosol cans," Robert Meyers told the Lansing, Mich., Economic Club. "You don't need missiles."
Anthrax and botulism spores can be cultivated, and nerve gas can be manufactured.
The Japanese cult Aum Shinri Kyo released Sarin nerve agent in a Japanese subway in 1995, killing 10 people and injuring hundreds of others.
One of the reasons the casualties in that attack were relatively minor is that the cult had not developed an adequate delivery system for the agent.
Nerve agents can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin, causing paralysis and death. A mist sprayed over a crowd could be devastating.
But a more likely scenario is the use of other poisonous chemicals that are regularly used in industry, such as cyanide, or phosgene and chlorine, both caustic gases, according to the federal source.
Ban to be lifted at 12:05 a.m.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned crop-duster flights nationally Sunday. The ban was to be lifted at 12:05 a.m. today in all time zones.
Bill Lockwood of Okanogan Air Service, head of the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Aviation Association, said crop-dusters across the state were contacted by the FAA within two days of the Sept. 11 attacks to ask about any contact with foreign nationals or suspicious people.
Any terrorist seeking to put a biological or chemical weapon on a crop-dusting airplane would face some serious obstacles, Lockwood said. Among them:
• They would need a pesticide-applicator license from the state Department of Agriculture, as well as a commercial pilot certificate and a separate certificate from the FAA, to lease a crop-duster.
• They would need to show documentation of their expertise in flying crop-duster planes, which are configured differently from Cessnas or other single-engine planes.
A pilot not skilled in flying crop-dusters, which have a wheel under the tail, would find the planes difficult to start and almost impossible to take off: "They don't want to track (fly) straight like the typical airplane. It's almost becoming a lost art. They are a lot harder to learn to fly," Lockwood said.
There are about 100 aerial applicator businesses in Washington, nearly all of them east of the Cascade mountains.
Little impact on regional growers
In Washington, the brief ban had little effect on growers. Some crops, such as cherries and pears, already have been harvested. And most growers of other crops probably can catch up from a two-day spray delay.
Wheat growers are sowing winter wheat now. Crop-dusters are used to apply herbicides and fertilizers to the ground.
Potato growers spray defoliants at this time of year to ready the fields for harvest. Apple growers spray a chemical called Stop Drop to keep apples on the trees longer to gain more red color, and keep the fruit from falling off in the wind.
The apple industry is in an economic depression that has led many farmers to cut back and eliminate spraying to save money.
Lockwood, a crop-duster since 1974, said he would normally have seven jobs in a single morning, but this year is his slowest ever, with just three jobs a week.
Pilots fly the planes as low as six to 15 feet from the ground, and tank up with hundreds of gallons of chemicals.
Lockwood said he has long been in the habit of disabling his plane every time he parks it, so no one could steal it "and use it for mischief."
Lynda V. Mapes can be reached at 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com. Mike Carter can be reached at 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com.
Information in this article, originally published September 25, was corrected September 27. The Washington Department of Agriculture licenses pesticide applicators. The wrong state agency was named in a previous version of this story.
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September 25, 2001, Sydney Morning Herald, Crop-duster Ban Amid New Fears Of Deadly Rain, by Paul McGeough,
Crop-duster Ban Amid New Fears Of Deadly Rain
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday September 25, 2001
Smaller planes may carry more lethal cargoes, writes Paul McGeough.
Last month, several men of Middle Eastern extraction - including one apparently matching the description of Mohamed Atta, a terrorist on the second plane to slam into the World Trade Centre - approached crop-dusting mechanics at Belle Glade in Florida, asking about the capacity of their aircraft.
Yesterday, Time magazine revealed that a manual on the operation of crop-dusting equipment had been found among the possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, arrested on August 17 after flight instructors became suspicious about his haste to become familiar with commercial aircraft.
Last week, it was reported that Afghans, masquerading as Turks and believed to be associated with Osama bin Laden, tried to buy 10 Russian crop-dusting aircraft when they were auctioned in Romania last year.
Amid this increasing evidence that the September 11 terrorists may have considered and may still be considering an assault with biological or chemical weapons, the FBI ordered the grounding yesterday of all crop-dusting aircraft.
Moussaoui, the man with the crop-dusting manual, is a French-Moroccan who, say French investigators, frequently travelled to Afghanistan and was trained in the terrorist camps run by bin Laden, named by the US as the prime suspect in the attacks. Time said the manual showed how to operate equipment that could be used to spray fast-killing toxins.
Investigators and experts are divided on the risk of a chemical or biological attack.
But on Sunday the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, said: "[The countries that sponsor terrorism] have very active chemical and biological warfare programs. We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world."
Iraq is among the countries the US accuses of having a chemical program and Atta, suspected of being the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, is believed to have met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Europe recently and to have travelled to Iraq several times.
It was the second time since September 11 that crop-dusters had been grounded for a day. The first time was on September 16, and although the planes are back in the air they are prohibited from flying near built-up areas.
The FBI told reporters that it was acting ``with an abundance of caution" in yesterday's grounding and the executive director of the National Agriculture Aviation Association, Mr James Callan, said that officials who contacted him on Sunday morning had described it as a ``national security issue".
The FBI warning to crop-dusting operators said: "[You] should be vigilant to any suspicious activity relative to the use, training in or acquisition of dangerous chemicals or airborne applications of same, including threats, unusual purchases, suspicious behaviour by employees or customers and unusual contacts with the public."
One of the first responses by authorities to the September 11 attacks was to immediately sample the air in and around New York to ensure germs and toxic chemicals had not been released. None was detected.
The biological agents that could be used by terrorists include smallpox, anthrax bacteria and botulinum, a bacterium that develops in the absence of oxygen.
Chemical agents include VX, a colourless and odourless liquid that turns to gas when mixed with oxygen; mustard gas; and sarin gas, which affects the entire nerve system.
The release of such agents could bring on an epidemic that would leave thousands sick and put health facilities under impossible pressure.
Terrorists first used chemicals as a weapon in 1995 when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring 6,000. The group had tested the chemicals on animals at a property in a remote part of Western Australia.
US authorities fear similar experiments may have been done at a bin Laden camp in the east of Afghanistan. They claim to have satellite photographs of dead animals at the camp and bin Laden has warned that the Muslim world has to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Last year the director of the CIA, Mr George Tenet, warned Congress that bin Laden operatives "have trained to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals or biological toxins".
A Congress panel found the chemical or biological attacks would be the biggest security risk in the next 25 years, concluding: "If you look at how we are organised to deal with such things at home, it is not a confidence-inspiring enterprise."
The US has also begun stockpiling drugs and vaccines for use in the event of an attack.
But, says Dr Tara O'Toole, of the Centre for Civilian Biodefence Studies at Johns Hopkins University, there are sufficient vaccines and drugs to combat less than a quarter of the 50 pathogens considered the likeliest to be used by terrorists.
Early this year a project called Dark Winter examined the ability of the US to handle a terror-driven outbreak of smallpox. The former head of emergency management for New York City, Mr Jerome Hauer, told Congress that the role-playing study had ended with the spread of the smallpox overwhelming all efforts to check it.
Speaking of the September 11 attacks, Mr Michael Osterholm, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, told The Wall Street Journal: "We have to help people to understand that was just a stepping stone when you consider what a biological agent can do."
And he warned that the impact of a biochemical attack could dwarf the death toll from the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Politicians are now demanding that some of the money set aside last week for military spending in the wake of the attacks needs to be used to better prepare the US for a chemical or biological attack.
Calling for $A2 billion to be set aside for defence against such attacks, Senator Edward Kennedy said: "It is clear that this nation remains vulnerable to a bioterrorist attack. Now, more than ever, we must arm ourselves with the best defence possible."
paulmcgeough@aol.com
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September 25, 2001, AP - The St. Augustine Record, Terrorists may have shown interest in Florida crop-dusting aircraft, by Amanda Riddle, Associated Press Writer,
Published Tuesday,
BELLE GLADE-- A group of Middle Eastern men repeatedly asked a fertilizer company about crop-duster planes in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks, company employees told FBI investigators.
J. D. 'Will" Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care, said Monday that groups of two or three Middle Eastern men came by almost every weekend for six or eight weeks before the attacks, including the weekend just before the Sept. 11 assaults.
Lee said the men were very persistent, asking 'odd questions" about his yellow and blue 502 Air Tractor crop-duster. "I wouldn't spend any time talking to them or telling them anything because I didn't think it was any of their business," Lee said.
Often arriving in rented vans at the Belle Glade Municipal Airport, where the crop dusting business is located, the men asked about the range of the airplane, how much it would haul, how difficult it was to fly and how much fuel it would carry, Lee said.
While the FBI investigated, the Federal Aviation Administration banned crop-dusting planes from flying on Sunday and Monday, concerned about the possibility of chemical and biological attacks. There are an estimated 3,500 agricultural aviators and this is a crucial time of the year for aerial spraying of crops, said James Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association.
Lee said a co-worker, James Lester, identified one of the men for the FBI as Mohamed Atta, believed to be one of the suicide hijackers in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Lester did not return a phone message seeking comment.
Belle Glade is about 40 miles west of West Palm Beach and about an hour's drive from where some of the suspected hijackers stayed before the attacks.
The ban on crop dusters was the second time that agricultural pilots were told not to fly since the attacks.
Asked about the new grounding, the FBI said it was one of the steps it has taken out of 'an abundance of caution" and 'in reaction to every bit of information and threats received during the course of this investigation."
Callan said he got a call from an FAA official about 8 a.m. Sunday.
'They said it was a national security issue," Callan said. 'I made some calls and the indication was that there still is no specific threat, but the FBI apparently ordered this and they just want to make sure that everyone in the ag aviation industry is keeping their eyes and ears open."
The Washington Post also reported that government investigators found a crop-duster manual among the possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in federal custody on immigration violations. He was detained after he sought flight training in Minnesota and the school grew suspicious and called authorities.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the potential threat Sunday on CBS' 'Face The Nation," saying that countries sponsoring terrorism have "very active chemical and biological warfare programs."
'We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world," he said.
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September 25, 2001, [5:02 AM EDT] AP, Probe Shines Light on Crop Dusters, by John Porretto, AP Business Writer,
JACKSON, Miss. -- They buzz over farmland across the nation, the enemy of weeds and insects. They affect what goes into millions of mouths.
Yet Americans rarely get to see the nation's 4,000 crop dusting planes in action or realize their importance to the nation's agricultural health and economy.
For many, the aircraft conjures up a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller "North by Northwest" in which one chases Cary Grant across a field.
The reality is that the average agricultural pilot protects between $12 million and $15 million in farm products each year, according to Pat Kornegay, president of the National Agricultural Aviation Association.
Two government bans on their use since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- the last of which was lifted early Tuesday -- have already affected the industry.
Crop duster pilots say they understand the need for national security measures, but they're frustrated because this is the time of year many pilots make the bulk of their income.
"I need to be spraying cotton right now because once it's mature and picked, there's no more work to be done," said Mike Wade, a duster for 24 years. "After that, you can do maintenance on your planes or go hunting -- but you're not going to make money doing either."
The aerial application of chemicals dates to 1921 when lead arsenate dust was spread over catalpa trees to kill moth larvae in Ohio. A year later, biplanes in the South killed boll weevils in cotton fields.
In those days, the planes were known as "crop-dusters" because they sprayed dry chemicals. Today, most use liquid products to control a variety of pests and diseases.
The planes have complicated computer systems that monitor guidance and chemical applications. A pilot must receive extensive training and typically works for several years on a ground crew before being able to fly one of the aircraft.
Kornegay said the chances of someone hijacking a crop-duster are remote because they're extremely difficult to fly. "Just getting one off the ground would be difficult for a general aviation pilot," Kornegay said.
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Terrorizing the Krispy Kremes
September 25, 2001, Sarasota Herald-Tribune [Manatee] page 1, FBI suspect may have wanted to buy a crop-duster plane, by Rick Weiss and Justin Blum,
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September 25, 2001, Washington Post, page A12, Suspect May Have Wanted to Buy Plane; Suspect inquired with US Dept. of Agriculture about buying a cropduster, by Rick Weiss and Justin Blum,
Suspect inquired with US Dept. of Agriculture about buying a cropduster
The man who the FBI believes flew an American Airlines plane into the World Trade Center Sept. 11 apparently walked into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Florida last year and asked about a loan to buy a crop-duster plane.
Employees told the man that the department does not offer such loans, and referred him to a local private lender, according to a bank president whose security chief was briefed by the FBI. It appears the man did visit that lender and made further inquiries about a crop-duster loan, but there is no record that he applied for one, according to Robert Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida.
The suspected hijacker's apparent interest in the spray planes has heightened fears that the United States may be at risk of an aerial assault involving biological or chemical weapons. The loan inquiry revelation comes one day after employees at a Florida municipal airport said the suspected hijacker, Mohamed Atta, and several other Middle Eastern men repeatedly visited the airport to learn more about crop-dusters.
The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the nation's crop-duster fleet three times for several days at a time since the attacks on New York and Washington two weeks ago. FAA officials said yesterday they hoped to lift the most recent grounding today at 12:05 a.m., suggesting that the threat, serious though it may be, is not imminent.
"We have no clear indication of the time or place of any such attack," Attorney General John D. Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. However, he added, "The search of computers, computer disks and personal baggage of another individual whom we have in custody revealed a significant amount of information downloaded from the Internet about aerial application of pesticides or crop dusting."
Experts yesterday offered differing assessments about how one might use a plane to release a deadly cloud of microbes over an unsuspecting populace. But choosing to err on the side of caution, FBI agents and other law enforcement officials fanned out across the country last week and over the weekend, warning agricultural aviators to keep a close eye on their equipment and report suspicious behavior immediately.
Those suspicions were based in part on the discovery last week that Atta and several colleagues made repeated visits to Belle Glade State Municipal Airport in Florida, starting in February of this year. There, they peppered agricultural aviators with questions about fuel and chemical capacities and asked how difficult it was to fly the planes.
Until yesterday, however, no evidence had been made public to suggest that Atta had looked into acquiring a plane.
Epling said yesterday that his bank, headquartered in Homestead, received a call from the FBI seven to 10 days ago saying that Atta had gone into a USDA office that until recently was in the bank's building. The agents asked if Atta had applied for such a loan from Community Bank, since USDA employees had apparently suggested to Atta that he try Epling's bank.
Several USDA employees had recently identified Atta to the FBI, and recalled that he wore Tommy Hilfiger clothes and a lot of cologne, according to the FBI version of events provided to the bank.
Epling said one employee had a vague memory of an encounter. "All he remembers is an inquiry about a loan for buying crop-dusters," Epling said of his employee. The employee thought the inquiry was in 2000 and did not remember the customer well enough to identify him as Atta, Epling said. The FBI said Atta may have gone to the USDA offices in April 2000, Epling said.
Employees in the USDA's Farm Service Agency, whose local office has since moved to neighboring Florida City, referred questions to a supervisor in the state headquarters. At a reporter's request, Kevin Kelley, state executive director for the USDA's Florida Farm Service Agency, contacted Johnell Bryant, a USDA loan manager in Florida City, to ask what had happened.
Kelley said Bryant declined to comment. "She said she was told by authorities not to speak about it," Kelley said. FBI officials also declined to comment.
Crop-dusters can be bought for as little as $80,000 to $100,000, said James Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association. No special security checks are conducted on pilots who apply for agricultural aviation licenses, according to the FAA.
It would be relatively easy to cause thousands of illnesses by spreading bacterial spores or viruses from a crop-duster, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's center for infectious disease research and policy.
Osterholm and John Schwartz describe such an effort in some detail in a recently released nonfiction book, "Living Terrors," which describes a hypothetical incident in which a disgruntled employee spreads anthrax over a football stadium with 74,000 spectators. Ten days after the attack, 30,000 were sick and 700 dead. By the next day, the number of dead doubled to 1,500.
"Even if one of these events is just halfway successful, it's going to be catastrophic beyond anything we've ever seen," Osterholm said yesterday.
Others expressed less concern.
"There are a lot of variables to get right, like particle size and meteorological conditions and pressure of the sprayer and the right dosage to kill or incapacitate people. It's not as simple as brewing something in your bathroom and spraying and killing thousands," said Leslie-Anne Levy, a research associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
Nonetheless, Levy said, "With enough time and know-how, you could certainly pull it off."
Ray Newcomb, president of JBI Helicopter Services in Pembroke, N.H., said the spray nozzles used by 90 percent of operators would be less than ideal for a terrorist. Most operators use what is called a "raindrop" nozzle, he said, which is designed for precision agriculture and drift control.
"If you were going to do some kind of damage, you would want a broadcast nozzle," he said, which if placed on a spray boom would spread the material over a 300-foot-wide swath instead of the 70-foot swath achievable with raindrop nozzles.
Ed Carter, owner of Carter Aviation and Aero Service at Southern Cross Airport in Williamstown, N.J., was one of many agricultural aviators recently interviewed by state police or federal investigators.
"They gave me pictures of the hijackers and left an 18-page list of names and said they could be suspects," Carter said. "They said that if anybody shows up and they just don't look right, or if we notice anything suspicious, we are to call them."
Others in the business said they have been advised by investigators to chain their propellers or even remove crucial engine parts at night to make it more difficult to steal the planes.
[From The Washington Post, Original link robots.txt as per usual]
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September 25, 2001, New York Times, Aviation Precautions: Crop-Dusters Are Grounded on Fears of Toxic Attacks, by Dana Canedy,
BELLE GLADE, Fla., Sept. 24 — The Federal Aviation Administration grounded crop-dusting planes for a second day today after investigators were told that at least one of the suspected hijackers in the terrorist attacks had asked about agricultural planes at a rural airport here.
In testimony before Congress today, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the government feared that crop-dusters could be used to "distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction" and added that one of the suspected hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had been compiling information about crop-dusting before the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition, Mr. Ashcroft said, "a search of computers, computer disks and personal baggage of another individual in custody revealed the significant amount of information downloaded from the Internet about aerial application of pesticides, or crop-dusting."
Last week, federal agents interviewed the general manager of a crop-dusting company here, about 80 miles northwest of Miami. The manager told the local police that more than a dozen Middle Eastern men had regularly visited the company in the weeks leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
J. D. Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care, at Belle Glade Municipal Airport, told the authorities that at least one of the suspected terrorists and his associates showed up at the business in a private plane or in minivans from February to August. Each time, they wanted to know how much fuel and chemicals the yellow 502 Air Tractor crop-dusters could carry and whether any special skills were needed to fly them, Mr. Lee said in an interview today.
One of Mr. Lee's employees, James Lester, who is charge of maintaining and loading the planes, identified one of the men from a Federal Bureau of Investigation photo as Mr. Atta, who is suspected of crashing American Airlines Flight 11 into one of the trade center towers.
Despite the government's concern about the use of crop-dusters for chemical or biological attacks, weapons experts speculated that the suspects were considering using them in much the same way that they used the passenger jets: as flying bombs. Instead of carrying pesticides, the crop-dusters could carry fuel.
"The most likely explanation is a conventional attack," said Jonathan B. Tucker, an expert on chemical and biological weapons at the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
But Mr. Tucker also said the planes could be used to dispense toxic chemicals or deadly germs. Chemicals would be easier to dispense than germs because the pore size of unmodified sprayer nozzles is right for dispensing liquid chemicals. Mr. Lee said Mr. Atta showed up at the crop-dusting business to inquire about the planes once in February and on another occasion he could not recall.
On the earlier visit, Mr. Atta flew in on a Cessna with two unidentified men. In July, Mr. Lee said, another group of Middle Eastern men visited his business as frequently as twice a week for about eight weeks. Their last visit was on the Saturday before the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.
"I've probably seen 12, 15 or 18 different ones, but some might have been the same ones," Mr. Lee said. During each trip, Mr. Lee said, the men asked what he said were in retrospect peculiar questions about the operation of the planes. "They were asking questions they didn't have any business knowing," he said.
"They asked about how big a load it could haul, how much fuel it could carry, how fast it could go and how hard it was to fly," Mr. Lee said.
On occasion the men videotaped the outside of the planes and seemed to assess airport facilities, Mr. Lee recalled. He said he had no reason to be suspicious because pilots often asked about the planes and because the Belle Glade area is home to many Middle Eastern families.
"I had no idea something was up at the time," Mr. Lee said. "But the minute the bombing happened, within an hour, it dawned on me about these people and all the questions they were asking."
The manager of another crop-dusting business at the airport, Adrian Rodriguez of Roma Services, said that he did not recall seeing the men at his facility but that last week the F.A.A. requested information about all his pilots and records from all flights for the past number of years.
Mr. Rodriguez, who is president of the local chapter of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, said the group had sent out a memorandum to its 3,500 members — including the 300 operating in Florida — with suggestions for increased security procedures across the country.
As part of that effort, Belle Glade Municipal Airport now has 24-hour security. All of Roma's planes have extra security devices that keep them from being started or moved from the parking locations.
Mr. Rodriguez said that, though the precautionary measures were called for, he did not see much risk of a crop-duster being stolen and used in an assault. "You can't be a regular pilot and fly one of these things," he said. "It takes lots of hours and experience to do this.
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September 25, 2001, Fox News, Order Grounding Crop-Dusting Planes Expires,
Shortly after midnight Monday, the duty officer at the FAA in Washington confirmed the ban was being lifted, first with the Eastern Time Zone.
"At five minutes after, the ban is being lifted in each time zone," said the officer, who did not give his name.
As the ban on agricultural flights ended, the FBI asked the industry to be vigilant about possible terrorist airborne chemical or biochemical attack schemes.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Monday that fears terrorists might conduct some kind of chemical or biological attack on the United States led to the grounding.
"Yesterday, the FBI issued a nationwide alert based on information they received indicating the possibility of attacks using crop-dusting aircraft," Ashcroft said in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.
"The FBI assesses the uses of this type of aircraft to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction as potential threats to Americans. We have no clear indication of the time or place of such attacks," he said.
The government has reason to believe terrorists have researched using crop-dusting planes in future attacks. J. D. "Will" Lee, 62, general manager of South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade, said Monday that groups of two or three Middle Eastern men came by almost every weekend for six or eight weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the weekend just before the assaults.
Lee said a co-worker, James Lester, positively identified one of the hijacking suspects, Mohamed Atta. Atta is believed to have been a ringleader in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Ashcroft confirmed that Atta was acquiring information on the use of crop-dusting aircraft prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition, he said a search of computers and computer discs and personal baggage of another suspect in custody revealed a "significant amount" of information downloaded from the Internet on the use of aerial applications of pesticides or crop-dusting.
The Washington Post also reported Sunday that government investigators found a crop-duster manual among the possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in federal custody in connection with the attacks.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld outlined the potential threat Sunday on CBS' Face The Nation, saying that countries sponsoring terrorism have "very active chemical and biological warfare programs."
"We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world," he said.
Crop-dusters also were grounded Sept. 16 and for the past week have been barred from flying over metropolitan areas, with some exceptions. The crop-dusters were grounded along with all other civilian aircraft after the attacks, with flights resuming Sept. 14.
Callan said there are probably about 3,500 agricultural aviators and that this is a crucial time of the year for aerial spraying of crops.
In Florida, state agriculture and law enforcement agents visited all of Florida's crop dusters to make security checks, state Agriculture Department spokesman Terence McElroy said. The operators are required to register with state officials.
McElroy said when the flights resume, pilots will be required to notify state officials of their flight times and aircraft tail numbers to allow law enforcement to track each plane.
State officials had to cut short aerial mosquito spraying in north Florida on Sunday morning because of the ban. The spraying is part of an effort to battle the West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis viruses.
In New Jersey, helicopters used for spraying against mosquitoes were grounded indefinitely within a 25-mile radius of the Newark airport and a 10-mile radius of the Philadelphia airport.
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September 25, 2001, Los Angeles Times, New Crop-Dusting Restrictions Weighed; Aircraft: Report that terrorists may have visited a company that flies the agricultural planes spurs concerns about chemical and biological weapons, by Aaron Zitner and John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writers,
WASHINGTON -- Faced with mounting evidence that terrorists had shown unusual interest in agricultural planes, federal officials are considering new restrictions on the export of crop-dusting and other aerosol equipment that could be used in chemical or biological weapons.
The proposal comes as law enforcement officials are reviewing the threat that crop-dusters, which are designed to spray pesticides and fertilizers on crops, could be used to deliver far more ominous materials.
In Florida, a mechanic at a crop-dusting service said Monday that Mohamed Atta, suspected of piloting a plane into the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, was among several foreign men who had visited his airport earlier this year and asked detailed questions about crop-dusting aircraft.
A Florida bank president said that a man, possibly Atta, had approached his bank with an unusual request for a loan to buy a crop-duster after making a similar request of the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year.
In Washington, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said authorities found "a significant amount" of crop-dusting information downloaded from the Internet when they searched the computer and personal baggage of a man they are holding for questioning.
The FBI has asked local law enforcement officials to identify crop-dusting aircraft in their areas and to "ensure that they are secured," Ashcroft told the House Judiciary Committee. Federal aviation officials have grounded crop-dusters twice since Sept. 11, in addition to the general grounding of all aircraft immediately after the attack. The latest grounding order, which was issued Sunday and ended early today, had been requested by federal law enforcement officials.
"The FBI assesses the uses of this type of aircraft to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction as potential threats to Americans," Ashcroft said. He said the FBI had received information "indicating the possibility of attacks" using crop-dusting aircraft, but that the agency had no specific information about any such attack.
But some terrorism and industry experts said Monday that the potential for crop-dusting planes to spread anthrax, smallpox, nerve gas or some other toxic material is low. The planes, they said, are poorly equipped to handle such a task.
Pilots Say Specialized Training Necessary
"The possibility that some terrorist organization would secure that much lethal agent, and be able to load it into a crop-duster without killing themselves and killing the pilot, is a very distant possibility," said Raymond Zilinskas, an expert in biological weapons at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Crop-dusting operators said that flying their planes requires specialized knowledge. Where most private planes have a single wheel under the nose, agricultural planes have a wheel under the tail, meant to stabilize the plane as it carries heavy loads over rough runways.
"Without having specialized training, I doubt someone could get it off the ground without tearing it up first," said Mark Hartz of Grand Prairie Dusters Inc. in Almyra, Ark.
Moreover, the tanks on crop-dusters have vents, making them poor containers for a chemical agent such as nerve gas, said Patrick Kornegay, who runs a Texas crop-dusting company and is president of the National Agricultural Aviation Assn. "You can't pump gas through the nozzle system," he said. "It would flow out of the vents."
Zilinskas, who served on two United Nations teams that inspected possible biological weapons sites in Iraq, said there are a range of technical problems to overcome in creating a biological or chemical weapon, but that Iraq and other hostile nations were working to solve them.
Zilinskas said that obtaining virulent strains of biological materials is difficult, and so is finding a way to grow them in suspension while keeping them potent and alive.
Equally difficult is creating a nozzle to disperse the materials, he said. Crop-dusting chemicals tend to be sprayed in large droplets, because farmers want the pesticides to fall onto plants quickly and sometimes to pierce the upper canopy of crop leaves. If the same nozzle sprayed a biological agent, Zilinskas said, the material would also fall to the ground and would not be inhaled.
If people did inhale the drops, he said, they would land in the upper respiratory system and would likely be coughed out.
But if the nozzle holes are too small, Zilinskas said, the lethal bacteria or viruses would be damaged and rendered impotent as they pass through. Moreover, he said, the materials would quickly clog up the nozzle.
Interest in Planes Alarms Some Experts
Two of these technical hurdles stopped the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo when it tried to spray Tokyo residents with anthrax in the early 1990s, Zilinskas said. "Not only did they have a problem obtaining a virulent strain--in fact, they obtained a nonvirulent strain--but when they drove their trucks through the city, the testimony is that their nozzles got clogged up," he said.
Aum Shinrikyo later killed 13 people and sickened hundreds by releasing the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system. But Zilinskas called it "a remote possibility" that terrorists could import or create enough nerve gas to cause mass casualties or mount the tanks on a crop-duster.
Other experts were more alarmed by the news of terrorist interest in crop-dusters. Crop-dusting nozzles "wouldn't be as effective as other hardware, but, sure, it would be something to be concerned about," said Ivan Kirk, a crop-dusting specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in College Station, Texas.
Kirk noted that some airborne spraying is aimed not at crops but at mosquitoes or medflies. That equipment uses a finer nozzle that aims to keep the pesticide in the air for a longer period of time, he said.
The proposed restriction on aerosol equipment exports is aimed at these finer nozzles, with orifices of 15 microns or smaller, Kirk said. Crop-duster nozzles often have orifices of 200 microns to 350 microns.
According to a document obtained by the National Agricultural Aviation Assn., State Department weapons proliferation officials have proposed that exports of certain "aircraft sprayers" and other aerosol equipment require a license if sent to a limited set of countries. State Department officials are citing "anti-terrorist reasons" for the proposed requirement, the document says. It is aimed at preventing the equipment from reaching Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba and Libya.
At the State Department, an official could provide few details of the proposal, but said it arose after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. State Department officials discussed the idea Monday with officials at the Commerce Department, which oversees export restrictions.
Bank Officer Recalls Unusual Loan Request
The Florida bank president said Monday that one of his loan officers remembered getting a request by telephone for financing to buy a crop-duster or crop-dusting company. Robert Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida in Homestead, said the officer could not identify the caller as Atta, and that the caller never submitted a loan application.
But Epling said the loan officer remembered the call because there is little crop-dusting in the area, and few requests to finance that business.
Epling said the loan officer recalled the incident after the FBI asked his bank last week to search its records for any signs of contact with Atta, particularly in connection with crop-dusting. The FBI also said that Atta had approached an area branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in person, for a loan. Epling said his bank shared a building with a branch office of the Agriculture Department.
In Belle Glade, Fla., on Monday, a worker at South Florida Crop Care, a crop-dusting service, recalled two visits by three foreign men earlier this year.
During one visit, one man asked numerous questions about the capabilities of crop-dusting aircraft. "He wanted to know how far the plane would fly, how much fuel the plane holds, what the capacity and the weight of the airplane were," said James Lester, in charge of ground maintenance for South Florida Crop Care. The man even wanted to get into the cockpit, but Lester refused.
Wednesday, Lester was shown a book of photographs by the FBI, and identified the inquisitive visitor as Atta, a presumed leader of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks.
Atta returned for a second visit to the Belle Glade airport sometime between March and May, Lester said.
J.D. "Willie" Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care, told reporters that groups of two or three Middle Eastern men came by almost every weekend for six or eight weeks before the terrorist attacks.
"The bottom line is, we were not observant at the time," Lee said. "To other people who handle hazardous products or equipment at any time, I say, be observant and try to get some background on suspicious people."
Zitner reported from Washington and Dahlburg from Florida. Times staff writer Norman Kempster also contributed to this report.
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September 25, 2001, The Topeka Capital-Journal, Crop-duster ban extended; Terrorism: Airborne chemical and biological attacks feared; Kansans in the industry vow to be 'vigilant', by Jonna Lorenz, Archived,
The key that never left the ignition of Dan Barker's spray plane before Sept. 11 now stays with him.
"We're just securing everything a little better when we close the doors at night," said Barker, a spray pilot in Goodland.
Barker is among the pilots in small Kansas towns who are keeping a tight grip on their keys and a watchful eye on their airplane hangars as they wait for the Federal Aviation Administration to lift its third grounding of crop dusters since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
Barker owns Barker Farm Services Inc., one of 136 businesses licensed to do agricultural aerial application in Kansas.
The thought that their small, often one-seater airplanes that have helped protect America's food supply since 1921 could be used as instruments of mass destruction is a new and chilling idea for many of them.
"It's pretty serious business," said Barker, president of the Kansas Agricultural Aviation Association. "I don't think anybody would have thought much of it until Sept. 11, but after what they did that day, they might do anything."
Agricultural aircraft were grounded along with all of the nation's planes after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Ag aircraft were singled out Sept. 16 for a second grounding by the FAA, concerned about the possibility of airborne chemical and biological attacks. A third grounding was issued Sunday and planned to be lifted Monday morning. Instead, it was extended until at least this morning.
Chris Wilson, of Wamego, executive director of the KAAA, said officials from the FAA checked the backgrounds of ag pilots in the state and found that only about five had received training in recent years. All of those were family members coming to work in family-owned ag aviation businesses, she said.
"Before last Sunday, I don't think any of us had thought about the possibility of an ag plane being used as a terrorist instrument," Wilson said. "It's definitely at the forefront of our minds now, and every pilot will do all they can to ensure that their aircraft is secure."
Ag aviation is a close-knit industry in Kansas, Wilson said, and pilots throughout the state know each other.
"It's pretty easy to identify here in Kansas that we didn't have anybody of the kind that they were looking for," Wilson said. "That's good; we just need to make sure that no one is able to take one of our planes and use it inappropriately."
News reports indicated suspected terrorists had asked about and videotaped crop-duster planes earlier this year, and authorities were reported to have found a crop-duster manual among the possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, who is in federal custody.
"I'm not particularly worried; I'm concerned," said Tony Martinez, owner of Tony's Aerial Spraying Inc. in Great Bend. "I'm being very vigilant."
Sprayers in Kansas do most of their work during the summer months, so the economic impact of the groundings has been minimal here.
"The impact at this time has not been extremely large; however, if this continues throughout the fall, that can change," Martinez said.
"I really don't have very many complaints," he said. "We've had a very minimum amount of inconvenience here at my business. We're fine, and we're just bearing with it."
Carol Severson is staffing the office at Great Plains Spraying in Colby, ready to inform pilot Ken Bixenman as soon as the grounding is lifted.
"He's got two or three fields to spray," Severson said.
She said most of the spraying yet to be done in that part of the state is on fallow land to control weeds or in preparation for planting.
Severson said she hasn't seen any changes in security at the business.
"Ken has always had a pretty secure operation," she said. "He's always kept his plane in hangars and locked whenever no one's here. We haven't done anything more as far as that's concerned."
Although ag pilots are losing business, and farmers are facing potential crop losses, you won't hear much griping. National security is their first priority.
"I hope it doesn't take them too long, but I'm not fussing about it much either, because I don't want to give those terrorists any type of opportunity," KAAA's Barker said.
He did paperwork and maintenance and planned to wash his airplane Monday afternoon while the grounding of ag aircraft continued.
Monday morning, Barker arranged for Hawkeye Spraying Service to use ground rigs to apply herbicides for a farmer who was preparing to plant wheat. Barker was scheduled to do the job himself and didn't want to leave his customer without service.
He also spent time on the phone telling KAAA members that the organization's fall fly-in was canceled. The event, which had been scheduled to start Wednesday in Goodland, gives ag aviators an opportunity to have their spray patterns tested to help them cut back on chemical drift and overspray. The event may be rescheduled for a later date.
In the meantime, ag pilots are keeping busy in the office and wondering how the terrorist attacks will affect their industry in the long run.
Barker said one possible change to the industry could be the requirement of transponders, which would help officials on the ground identify the airplanes and their locations. He said it would cost $1,000 to $2,000 to equip an airplane with a transponder.
Most noticeably, though, pilots will just keep a closer watch on their equipment.
Jonna Lorenz can be reached at (785) 295-1294 or jlorenz@cjonline.com.
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September 25, 2001, Orlando Sentinel, Crop-Dust Rules Likely To Tighten, by Dan Tracy, Sentinel Staff Writer,
When Pilots Resume Work, They Might Have To Give Police A Detailed Flight Plan.
Crop-dusters were hoping to take to the sky again today after being grounded a third time by anxious federal authorities.
The industry was shut down Sunday by the Federal Aviation Administration for national-security reasons. FAA officials declined to be more specific.
But the fear is that a crop-duster could be commandeered by terrorists and flown over a major city, dropping toxic chemical or biological agents on the people. Crop-dusting pilots and experts say that worry is understandable, but unlikely to occur because the planes are difficult to fly and liquid poisons are hard to find in large quantities.
The crop-dusting ban was supposed to be lifted at 12:05 a.m. today, allowing the planes that spray bug-killing chemicals on crops from citrus to corn to fly again with the morning light.
During the downtime, the FAA was seeking background checks on crop-dusting pilots and mechanics, apparently looking for possible connections to the hijackers who flew jumbo jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
Crop-dusting company owners also are setting up a system to notify law-enforcement agencies that a flight is about to occur, where the plane is headed and when it will land.
"That shouldn't be a problem. We'll be glad to do that," said Ray Dyson, chief pilot of Southeast Aerial Crop Service in Fort Pierce.
FAA and FBI investigators learned last week that several groups of Middle Eastern men, including one whom authorities think flew a plane into the World Trade Center, had been talking with crop-dusting businesses in Belle Glade about how to fly such aircraft.
One of the visits occurred the weekend before the terrorist attacks that apparently killed more than 6,000.
Authorities also have found a manual on crop-dusters in the possession of a man linked to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire labeled the prime suspect behind the mass murders.
People associated with bin Laden reportedly have tried to obtain chemical and biological weapons, although it is unclear if they were successful.
Such discoveries have led authorities to speculate that crop-dusters could be turned into weapons, just as the commercial airliners were.
Crop-dusters, after all, are designed to carry chemical payloads of up to 800 gallons and are capable of dispersing them over 30 acres in a minute's time.
They are flown only by specially trained pilots, and typically are kept at small airports with little or no security.
A nationwide alert by the FBI and an agriculture-aviation association has warned pilots and mechanics to report any suspicious people and to disable and lock the planes when they are not in use.
Clarke Mosquito Control, with an office in Kissimmee, also was kept out of the air by the FAA. The company has increased security in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, but declined to provide details.
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September 25, 2001, The New Zealand Herald, FBI grounds crop dusters over fears of chemical attack on US cities, by Staff and agencies, Archived,
[12:30 AM Tuesday Sep 25, 2001]
The FBI yesterday ordered crop-dusting planes across the United States grounded for 24 hours because of fears that Osama bin Laden's network may have been considering a biological or chemical attack on American cities.
It was the second time that agricultural pilots have been told not to fly since the September 11 attacks.
The FBI said it had taken the step out of "an abundance of caution" and "in reaction to every bit of information and threats received during the course of this investigation".
James Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, said a Federal Aviation Administration official had called him about the grounding and said it was a national security issue.
"I made some calls and the indication was that there still is no specific threat," he said.
"But the FBI apparently ordered this and they just want to make sure that everyone in the agriculture aviation industry is keeping their eyes and ears open."
FAA spokesman Scott Brenner said: "The intelligence community came to us and encouraged us to shut down the crop dusters."
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the potential threat on CBC's Face The Nation programme, saying that countries sponsoring terrorism had "very active chemical and biological warfare programmes".
"We know that they are in close contact with terrorist networks around the world," he said.
Crop dusters were previously grounded on September 16, and for the past week have been barred from flying over metropolitan areas, with some exceptions.
They had been grounded along with all civilian aircraft immediately after the attacks, with flights resuming on September 14.
Mr Callan said the US had about 3500 agricultural aviators, and this was a crucial time of the year for aerial spraying of crops.
Time magazine has reported that a grounding order was first issued after a manual on cropdusting was found among the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the suspects in the attacks.
Moussaoui, a French Moroccan, went frequently to Afghanistan. French intelligence believes he trained there in camps run by bin Laden.
He lived in London for several years until he left for the US early this year to take flying lessons in Oklahoma and Minnesota.
But his instructors grew suspicious and tipped off the authorities.
Moussaoui was detained on August 17.
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September 25, 2001, Reuters, Risks crop-duster planes to attack Europe seen low, by David Brough,
Crop-dusting planes were grounded in the United States on Sunday as the FBI urged vigilance to "suspicious activity" involving hazardous chemicals used in aerial spraying of farm fields after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Time magazine reported on Saturday that investigators had found a crop-dusting manual during a search for those responsible for the attcks, triggering concern crop-dusting planes might be used for chemical or biological assaults.
In Europe, aerial crop-dusting of fields with insecticides and pesticides takes place on a much smaller scale than in the United States, given smaller fields and concerns over wind-blown contamination of residential areas, officials say.
Limited aerial crop-spraying takes place over paddy rice fields in Spain, wine-growing areas of the Mosel Valley in Germany, olive trees in the Greek island of Corfu and a few upland areas of Scotland and Wales to control bracken.
Aerial crop-dusting is banned in Italy where ground-based equipment is used, even in the soaked paddy fields of the Po Valley.
"There is not very much crop-dusting by air in Europe. The practical problem for a terrorist would be finding suitable equipment," said Theodor Friedrich, senior officer for farm mechanisation with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation.
"Most spraying is done with ground-based equipment, which is more efficient and poses fewer environmental risks," he added.
"With tractors, 90 percent of pesticides get to the target area. From the air, only 50-70 percent reach the target area."
Aerial crop-dusting requires spraying of more chemicals than ground equipment, aircraft are costly, and there is a greater risk in Europe where fields are smaller than in the United States that the wind can blow chemicals into housing areas.
"Spraying from the air is less efficient because you are further away from the target area," Friedrich said. "If you release chemicals higher in the air, the spray evaporates and can come down far away."
TOUGH LICENSING
Another factor reducing risks for citizens is that in Europe, regulation of crop-dusting operations is already tight, including checks on the quality of spraying equipment and stringent licensing rules for the small band of operators.
German, French, British and Italian officials had no immediate reports of heightened vigilance in their countries' small crop-dusting operations.
"We are not aware of any changes to measures on the very minimal crop spraying activity here," said a spokeswoman with Britain's Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Department.
"It would not be easy for some strange character to charter a plane and swap its contents," she added.
A spokeswoman for Germany's Federal Ministry of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture also downplayed the threat.
"The aircraft involved are very small and we do not view this as posing any terrorist threat," she said.
However, some officials said that crop-dusting planes in the wrong hands would not need much toxic material to do horrific damage and would have much more impact spraying deadly chemicals on people in the cities than on farms.
| September 25, 2001, The Irish Times, Suspect tried to buy crop-duster - reports, A suspected hijacker in the US terror attacks asked officials how to get a government loan to buy a crop-dusting plane, it emerged today. The man - Mohamed Atta, who is believed to have flown the first plane into the World Trade Centre - reportedly asked about the loan at a Department of Agriculture office and at least one bank last year. Crop-dusting planes have been grounded in the US amid fears that the terrorist gang behind the September 11th attacks were planning to use them to spray nerve agents, or other chemicals. FBI agents found a manual on crop-dusting in a suspected terrorist hideout and have asked crop-dusters to report any unusual or suspicious purchases of dangerous chemicals. Another man arrested as part of the terror attacks probe had downloaded "a significant amount of information" about crop-dusting and pesticides from the Internet", US Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "We have no clear indication of the time or place of any such attack," he said. Mr Atta and several other men made repeated visits to Belle Glade State Municipal Airport in Florida earlier this year and asked crop-dusting pilots about fuel, chemicals and flying techniques, the Washington Post reported. The Agriculture Department and FBI refused to comment on the report. |
September 25, 2001, The New Paper, FBI grounds crop-dusters; US fears bio-terrorism may be the next threat, by Eugene Wee, Singapore Press Holdings,
September 25, 2001, Athens Banner‑Herald, Crop-dusters remain grounded as FBI probes terrorist threat, by Amanda Riddle,
September 26, 2001, Daily Post (Liverpool) Terrorists Tried to Buy Plane for Chemical Attack,
September 26, 2001, The Birmingham Post (England) War on Terror: Hijackers Tried to Get Loan for Crop Planes,
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September 27, 2001, Sun-Sentinel, State Sets Crop-dusting Rules, by Kathy Bushouse, Staff Writer,
There's no more business as usual for the state's crop-duster pilots.
New emergency rules imposed Wednesday by the Florida Department of Agriculture require the state's 150 agricultural pilots to file advance flight plans with state officials, provide tail numbers and descriptions of their planes and disclose the chemicals they're using.
"At any given point, we will know exactly who's up there," said Terence McElroy, an agriculture department spokesman.
Should any unauthorized crop-duster planes be noticed by civil defense forces doing surveillance flights, officials will know "that this person doesn't belong up there," he said.
Agriculture officials will determine at a later date whether to make the rules permanent, McElroy said.
The emergency order will last "for the foreseeable future," he said.
Crop-duster planes resumed flights Tuesday after being halted Sunday and Monday by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Officials stopped the flights amid reports that suspected hijackers responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks had been to Belle Glade asking about the crop-duster planes and the amount of poison they could hold.
FBI agents have been in Belle Glade, talking to people about their interaction with the suspected hijackers.
The FAA did place its own restrictions on crop-duster planes once they returned to the skies, but those are unrelated to any state rules, said agency spokesman Christopher White.
Under the new FAA restrictions, crop-duster planes cannot fly within 30 miles of Miami International Airport, White said.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach have no 30-mile restriction, White said.
There are just a handful of crop-duster companies in South Florida, mostly in western Palm Beach County.
One employee at a Belle Glade crop-duster company said officials might have gone too far with the new rules.
"I think they're overreacting. The [terrorists' crop-duster interest] happened here, and they feel it's their duty to get involved with it, I guess," said J.D. "Will" Lee, general manager of South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade. "They should have inducted these rules back when people were drug-smuggling a few years back."
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September 28, 2001, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, page A1, Hijacker with cold stare hated mission of blending in, by Chris Davis, diigo,
He was just what you would expect from a man who hated America but wanted to hide it. Awkward in American traditions like bar hopping and gym worshipping. Quiet and standoffish.
Going through the motions of Americanizing his behavior and hating every second of it, Mohamed Atta drank cranberry juice when his fellow terrorists boozed at bars. He didn't socialize. He wore jeans and button-up shirts to the gym.
He even looked the part, with a creepy, angular face, oversized eyes and a chin that stopped too fast and begged for a beard. People remembered that face, said they couldn't forget it, all over Florida, where Atta spent a year training to kill. But Atta, despite the questioning looks he provoked, managed to fit in well enough to get his grisly job done.
Only after he crashed his plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center did people's jaws drop in recognition. The double-takes, at Venice, Sarasota, and Opa-locka flight schools, at a Delray Beach gym and a German university, came too late to save anyone.
Now, investigators have revealed that Atta avoided detection for as long as six years, waiting, studying, steeling himself for his propulsion into infamy. The man Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, called the "Pied Piper of the hijackers" may have launched his plans as long ago as 1995, when he left college in Germany and traveled to Mecca.
His experience in Saudi Arabia is still a mystery. But a religious journey to that most holy Islamic site is transforming. Millions make the journey every year to cleanse their souls and confirm their faith in Allah. The journey is symbolic of the A.D. 630 trip made by the prophet Mohammed, who took his followers to Mecca to purge it of evil -- to destroy the idols and other symbols people had dedicated to false gods.
When Atta returned from his trip, he was changed, his college professors told The New York Times. Now bearded, he displayed his religious beliefs more visibly. He won permission in 1999 from the Technical University of Hamburg to use classroom space for prayer sessions, which, investigators now believe, may have doubled as a recruitment tool for Atta's terrorist plot.
On the dedication page of his urban planning thesis, Atta wrote words that now seem unsettlingly prophetic: "My prayers, my sacrifice, my life and my death belong to Allah."
Infiltrating
Thirty-one, educated, his pockets stuffed with money, Atta entered the United States in the summer of 2000 willing to die. On the surface, he did all the right things to fit in -- shaved his beard, rented suburban homes, bought a decade-old Pontiac.
With Marwan al-Shehhi, he began shopping for a flying instructor. Al-Shehhi is believed to be Atta's nephew and the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Atta started in Norman, Okla., where he toured Airman Flight School but politely moved on. In July 2000, he turned to Florida, and, for a reason that remains unknown, chose to settle in the quaint but unremarkable city of Venice.
Huffman Aviation was perfect for his purposes. The Venice flight school was stocked with foreigners, including people from the Middle East.
Charlie Voss, a Huffman employee at the time, was even willing to put Atta up in his home for a while, until he and his traveling friend al-Shehhi could find a permanent place to rent.
Atta and al-Shehhi fell into a routine, typically leaving home around noon for flying lessons and returning at 10 p.m. He and friends hung out at Venice bars, including Outlook and 44th Aero Squadron, where they ordered Bud Light, stayed sober and talked quietly.
"I never had any problems with them," said Aero Squadron owner Ken Schortzmann. "They didn't want to be bothered, but didn't drink heavily or flirt with the waitresses, like some of the other flight students."
Low-profile, focused, but trying to fit in.
Atta avoided contact with local Muslims and apparently never visited any of the three mosques in Southwest Florida.
Rumors have spread around Siesta Key that Atta and his companion got their hair cut in American styles at Siesta's Hollywood Hair, where FBI agents interviewed stylists Sept. 12. Salon employees have declined to comment.
But Atta's facade wasn't seamless. It suffered the cracks of a man who couldn't quite fit into the role, who refused to completely give himself over to the culture he hated.
Put off by their slovenly habits and rudeness, Voss and his wife, Dru, after one week began questioning their decision to welcome Atta and al-Shehhi into their home.
One day, Atta walked up to Dru Voss and hissed in her ear, "It must be nice to sleep all day and do what you want to do."
The couple ordered the men out that night.
After moving to a rental home in Nokomis, Atta regularly bought sandwiches at the Publix deli in Venice, where Ann Cook remembers a silent man whose stare could lift the hairs on your neck.
"Just looking at him, you knew he was nasty," Cook told Cox News Service.
Atta spent a lot of time using computers at Huffman Aviation.
One day in October 2000, fellow flight student Anne Greaves saw Atta and his perennial sidekick, al-Shehhi, hugging and dancing in the computer room. At the time, she figured they had gotten some good news by e-mail, she told The New York Times. Now, she believes the men had been celebrating the Oct. 12 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in the Middle East.
After six months of flight school, Atta and al-Shehhi sought the next step in their training, visiting SimCenter Inc. in Opa-locka and buying three hours each on a Boeing 727 simulator for $1,500.
In January 2001, immediately after earning their commercial pilot licenses, Atta and al-Shehhi left Venice. They apparently moved to the east coast of Florida, where they began pestering employees at South Florida Crop Care for vital statistics about crop dusting planes.
Dressed in collared shirts and Bermuda shorts, as if they had just walked off a golf course, Atta and several other Middle Eastern men arrived the first time in a small plane.
They followed employee James Lester around as he worked that day, peppering him with questions about the Belle Glade company's plane.
"He was wanting to know how much fuel the airplane held, was it hard to fly," said General Manager Willie Lee. "They said they were in flight school. They were out on a Saturday, riding and looking at airplanes."
Lee said the men visited several more times.
A few months later, Broward County authorities pulled Atta over and ticketed him for driving without a license. He applied for and was issued a license six days later, on May 2, according to Florida Department of Motor Vehicle documents.
Two months before the attack on the World Trade Center, Atta started what looks like his final preparations. He joined a World Gym in Delray Beach, where he caught people's attention by wearing dress shirts and jeans while jerking weights around like a novice.
He put thousands of miles on rental cars shuttling back and forth from Florida to Boston in August and September. And he flew at least once from Portland, Maine, into Boston's Logan airport. He lost a bag on that trip, and in it, investigators found his will, the Boston Globe reported.
Maybe to celebrate his upcoming victory, or maybe to remind himself of the perceived evil he was fighting, Atta went to a bar in Hollywood four days before the attack. He drank fruit juice while his two companions got loaded, spending $48 in 90 minutes at Shuckums Oyster Bar and Seafood Grill.
The men argued with the bartender over the bill but eventually paid it, Atta saying, "I have plenty of money. I'm a pilot."
A father's denial
Atta's father, Mohammed al-Amir Atta, swears those weren't the words of his son. He steadfastly has claimed that his son isn't a terrorist, that he was alive the day after the attack and that someone stole his identity.
"Oh God! He is so decent, so shy and tender," the father, a 65-year-old retired lawyer living in Cairo told The New York Times. "He was so gentle. I used to tell him, 'Toughen up, boy!'"
The elder Atta said he sheltered his children from people all their lives in order to steer them toward an education. He painted his son as a mama's boy who got sick when flying.
Atta was so intensely shy around women, his father told Newsweek, that he would only shake hands with a woman if she extended her hand first.
"I started reminding him to get married. Many times I asked him to marry a woman of any nationality -- Turkish, Germany, Syria -- because he did not have a girlfriend like his colleagues," the father told Newsweek. "But he insisted that he would marry an Egyptian. He was never touching women, so how can he live?"
He said his son has never been one for politics and causes.
Evidence, and people who knew Atta as an adult, suggest otherwise.
Two German classmates, Volker Hauth and Ralph Bodenstein, told The New York Times that in the 1990s Atta spoke with increasing bitterness about the Middle East's ties with the United States. He decried Egypt's ruling elite as "fat cats" too soft on the United States.
U.S. officials say Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials this year, the best evidence yet that Iraq may have known of the terrorist plot. A Spanish newspaper, quoting anonymous sources, reported that Atta is the man who met with four Islamic extremists in Spain less than two months before the attack. U.S. investigators have no doubt that Atta was one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Someone using Atta's name used the Internet to buy a ticket on American Airlines Flight 11. A surveillance video captured Atta boarding a commuter plane from Portland to Boston and arriving in time for Flight 11.
And so, the questioning looks Atta earned from Floridians, the sense of those who met him that something wasn't quite right, turned out to be accurate.
Ivan Chirivella, a Sarasota flight instructor who briefly taught Atta and alShehhi, said he was overcome with guilt when he realized who the men were.
Chirivella was uneasy enough with the men to kick them out of school for unsafe flying.
"But they were just two students with valid student visas, money and proper paperwork. There was no reason to suspect."
He did a double-take when he saw Atta's picture after Sept. 11. Like all the others, it was too late.
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October 5, 2001, New York Times, Filipinos Recall Hijack Suspects Leading a High Life, by Don Kirk,
MABALACAT, Philippines— They stayed at a popular resort hotel here, drank whiskey with Philippine bargirls, dined at a restaurant that specializes in Middle Eastern cuisine and visited at least one of the local flight schools.
The two men suspected by the FBI of being at the controls of the planes that flew into New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11 left those traces behind from visits from 1998 to 2000 to this hustling market town outside a former U.S. Air Force base, according to local residents who say they recognized the two from news photographs.
Philippine and U.S. investigators have been checking out the reported movements here of Marwan Al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta. They would not confirm the accused hijackers' presence in the Philippines, but the local hotel workers were willing to discuss them.
Mr. Al-Shehhi, whom the FBI has identified as the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175 when it slammed into the trade center's south tower, threw a party with six or seven Arab friends at the Woodland Park Resort Hotel here in December, said a former waitress at the hotel, Gina Marcelo. "There were about seven people," she said. "They rented the open area by the swimming pool for 1,000 pesos. They drank Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey and mineral water. They barbecued shrimp and onions. They came in big vehicles, and they had a lot of money. They all had girlfriends." She cited "one big mistake they made." Unlike most foreign visitors, "They never tipped," she said. "If they did, I would not remember them so well."
Victoria Brocoy, a chambermaid at the Woodland, recalls Mr. Atta, the Egyptian who investigators believe flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the trade center's north tower. "He was not friendly. If you say hello to him, he doesn't answer. If he asks for a towel, you do not enter his room. He takes it at the door."
Mr. Atta was by no means a recluse. "Many times I saw him let a girl go at the gate in the morning," she said. "It was always a different girl."
: The accounts here tend to confirm reports from the United States that at least some of the accused hijackers had free-wheeling lifestyles full of sex and alcohol, and took precautions to keep their identities secret.
They are assumed to have gravitated here in search of flying lessons. The area is a hub for pilots and flying instructors, Filipinos as well as foreigners, as a result of its relationship to Clark Air Base, converted to a special economic zone after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1991. At least two flying schools offer lessons, one of them in the zone; the other, the Angeles City Flying Club, is owned by the same corporation as the Woodland hotel, about 20 kilometers to the east.
The hijacking suspects were introduced to the hotel, according to workers who saw them, by a Jordanian businessman who runs a travel agency in Manila and often stays there but denies having known them.
Their presence aroused little curiosity in the male-dominated foreign community that ranges from retired military people to tourists from Europe, Australia and the Middle East, many of them drawn by the cheap prices and the availability of the local women.
The investigation by Philippine and American authorities has focused not only on the timing of their visits to this town about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Manila but also into exactly what they were doing and why.
The search is complicated by the fact that they made certain not to register under their own names, but two patterns have emerged from the investigation, according to Philippine police officials. The first is that the two displayed a keen interest in learning how to fly small planes, and the second is that they dominated a clique of Arab visitors, most of whom have not been seen since shortly before the attacks.
Ferdinand Abad, who was working as a security guard at the entrance to the hotel in mid-1999, remembers Mr. Atta asking at what time he should wait outside the Woodland hotel for a van to take him to the Angeles City Flying Club.
"I told him about 7 in the morning, and he gave me a tip of 50 pesos," — about $1 — Mr. Abad said. "Two or three times a week the van would pick him up. He didn't say he was going to fly. After our first meeting, he never talked, never said hello."
The driver of the van, Mr. Abad said, was Melvin Troth, manager of the flying club, who retired as a master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force in 1986 after serving his last tour at nearby Clark Air Base. Mr. Troth told investigators, however, that the names of Mr. Atta and Mr. Al-Shehhi did not appear in his records.
"I pick up a lot of people and take them out here," he protested to a colonel from the Philippine National Police headquarters, one of a stream of official visitors to the Flying Club in recent days, as a reporter was present. "It's a regular procedure. I don't remember them."
On the base, converted to a special economic zone after the Philippine Senate refused to extend the bases agreement with the United States in 1991, Philippine officials respond to such denials with derision mingled with serious concern.
"We want the whole world to know about the danger of these people around here," said Tony Salenga, chief executive assistant to the chairman of the Clark Development Corp., which is responsible for attracting investors to the former base to set up stores and factories there. "We believe they were establishing cells right here."
Residents recall that friends of Mr. Atta and Mr. Al-Shehhi often gathered at the Woodland Park and at the Jerusalem Restaurant in Angeles City, which borders the base just south of here.
Trudis Dago, manager of the restaurant, remembered Mr. Atta as someone who "would never smile and would never talk to anyone except his friends."
"I knew this face when I saw it in the paper," she said.
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October 15, 2001, Agence France-Presse, Publisher's wife rented out apartment to two suspected hijackers: report,
MIAMI, Oct 14 (AFP) - A realtor married to the editor of the Sun newspaper -- where the first in a string of anthrax cases broke out - - rented an apartment to two suspected hijackers in last month's terror attacks, the Miami Herald reported Sunday.
The revelation marks the first known link between the hijacking suspects and the anthrax outbreak, officials said.
The Herald reported that the wife of Sun editor Michael Irish rented out an apartment in nearby Delray Beach apartment to alleged hijackers Marwan Alshehhi and Saeed Alghamdi.
Alshehhi was aboard United Flight 175, the second jet to strike the World Trade Center.
Alghamdi was on United Flight 93, which crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh when passengers thwarted an attempt to target another building.
"There is now a link between the editor's wife and the terrorists," said FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela.
Orihuela said the FBI wasn't drawing immediate conclusions about the connection.
"Right now it looks like a coincidence," Orihuela said from outside the Boca Raton headquarters of American Media Incorporated (AMI), the Sun tabloid's parent company.
"We are not searching the apartment at this time. We are focusing on this building."
The Sun employed photo editor Bob Stevens, who died earlier this month from inhalation anthrax. Two other AMI employees were exposed, and five more are being retested to confirm positive blood test results.
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October 15, 2001, The Miami Herald, New link in Boca anthrax case; Terror suspects rented from editor's wife, by Alfonso Chardy, Wanda J. DeMarzo and Ronnie Greene, Archived, diigo,
Confirming a clear link between the terrorists targeting America and the South Florida company hit by anthrax cases, the FBI said Sunday that the wife of The Sun tabloid editor rented two Delray Beach apartments to two hijack suspects killed in the Sept. 11 suicide missions.
The Sun is part of the American Media Inc. tabloid chain, and it employed photo editor Bob Stevens, who died this month from inhalation anthrax. Two other AMI employees were exposed, and five more are being retested to confirm positive blood test results.
Sun editor Michael Irish's wife, Gloria, a real estate agent, rented unit 1504 at the Delray Racquet Club, 755 Dotterel Rd., to Hamza Alghamdi and unit 260 at the Hamlet Country Club, 401 Greensward Lane, to Marwan al-Shehhi this summer, said FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela.
Al-Shehhi and Alghamdi were on United Airlines Flight 175, the second jet to strike the World Trade Center.
"There is now a link between the editor's wife and the terrorists," Orihuela said.
But just as quickly, she said the FBI wasn't drawing immediate conclusions.
"Right now, it looks like a coincidence," Orihuela said from outside the tabloid's Boca Raton headquarters. "We are not searching the apartments at this time. We are focusing on this building."
In other developments Sunday, three more anthrax exposures were reported from a letter received at NBC in New York, and four Microsoft workers who came in contact with a contaminated letter in Nevada tested negative for anthrax. The exposures in New York were to a police officer who handled the letter, and to two lab technicians.
In South Florida, the apartment connection marks the most direct link to date between the hijack suspects and the AMI anthrax cases. It was first reported in The Mail newspaper in Great Britain.
The Delray Racquet Club apartment in question is central to a massive federal investigation into the terrorist attacks. Investigators trying to piece the puzzle together created a diagram that includes photos of the 19 hijack suspects.
At the center of the diagram, which was obtained by The Herald: an image of a house with the address 755 Dotterel Rd. Arrows link nine of the suspects to the icon.
Hamza Alghamdi rented the apartment in Delray Beach just north of Boca Raton, the FBI said. The other seven, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, are connected because they visited the apartment or otherwise had a direct tie to the inhabitants, said a federal official familiar with the investigation.
Previously, only Saeed Alghamdi and another terrorism suspect, Ahmed Alnami, both aboard United Flight 93, which crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, were the only terror suspects connected to the Delray Racquet Club apartment.
MEETING GROUND
It is clear that the apartment was a meeting ground for terrorists, authorities say. Now they must determine whether unit 1504 was also a hatching ground for the anthrax attacks.
Gloria Irish, the wife of tabloid editor Michael Irish, was approached by reporters Sunday afternoon outside her Delray Beach home.
"I can't believe you people," said Irish, who works for the Pelican Properties real estate company. "We are not making any comments."
Irish told the FBI she had several conversations with al-Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi when they came to her asking to rent two apartments, Orihuela said.
At the AMI building Sunday, a Palm Beach County special operations fire truck dropped off two hazardous materials containers as the investigation continued.
In addition to Stevens and the two other workers who were exposed to the bacteria, AMI general counsel Michael Kahane said, five people tested positive for anthrax antibodies, which indicates that at some point in their lives they were exposed. But officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the findings are preliminary and that more tests are necessary. Authorities said that none displayed symptoms, and all were being treated with antibiotics.
One AMI employee who asked not to be identified said three of the five work for the National Enquirer, another of the company's publications housed in the same building.
Other employees continue to be tested for the presence of anthrax bacteria and to be interviewed by the FBI.
"They asked where I sat in the building, how close I was to where Stevens worked, how often I dealt with the mailroom, if I knew of any employee who might have been a target, or of any animosities among employees,'' said National Enquirer reporter Kevin Lynch.
Among other areas of inquiry: if he knew of any disgruntled employees or whether he had any scientists among his relatives or friends. Other AMI workers say they are being asked similar questions, which indicates that the FBI is casting a wide net to trace the source of the anthrax.
As a search for clues continued in South Florida, and the number of anthrax exposures grew across the country, investigators are grappling with whether the cases are the work of the Sept. 11 terrorists.
When the anthrax reports first surfaced, federal officials were quick to say they saw no connection. But the authorities' tone has changed slightly: They now say they can't rule out a link.
One of the nation's leading biological warfare researchers said Sunday that the appearance of multiple anthrax infections suggests the possibility of a bioterrorist attack.
"The level of suspicion is high for me, though it's still open for me whether it's a bioterrorist attack," said C.J. Peters, former chief of special pathogens at the CDC.
Peters, now a professor of microbiology and coauthor of the 1997 book Virus Hunter, said his suspicion may turn to certainty if strains of the bacteria found in Florida, New York and Nevada are the same.
"If so, then there is one bad guy or one bad organization out there doing this," he said.
A federal official familiar with the investigation said that prior to the New York exposures, investigators were treating the Boca Raton incident as an "isolated criminal case."
But with the New York and Nevada cases, the same official shifted gears: "Maybe there is a concerted conspiracy connected to the Sept. 11 attacks."
Frederick Southwick, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said investigators seeking to link the Florida and New York anthrax events must find the same bacteria strain to make the link.
"The key is whether the DNA fingerprint of the strain in New York matches the DNA fingerprint of the one in Florida,'' he said. "If it matches, then one person or one organization is perpetrating this thing. If it doesn't match, then New York could be a copycat incident."
In South Florida, another potential link between the terrorists and anthrax cases involves hijacking suspect Ahmed Alghamdi, killed on the same Boston-to-L.A. flight as al-Shehhi. Using the Internet and an address in Saudi Arabia, he subscribed to Mira!, the Spanish-language tabloid published by AMI, according to law enforcement sources.
DATABASE SEARCH
It is one of two tabloid subscriptions now under scrutiny by federal investigators, who said they intend to scour the tabloid giant's databases to see whether classified ads were used by the hijackers to communicate.
Also Sunday, the anthrax scare continued to trigger a steady flow of calls to police regarding "strange powders" in South Florida and elsewhere.
Hazardous materials team members descended on a Sun-Sentinel newspaper warehouse after two employees reported discovering a suspicious package in the morning. Preliminary tests proved negative, but further tests were planned.
Miami police said they continued to receive calls.
"A month ago or two months ago I doubt we would have had any of this," said Miami Lt. Bill Schwartz.
"Now people, understandably, are very concerned."
Herald staff writers Larry Lebowitz, William Yardley and Johnny Diaz and Herald wire services contributed to this report.
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October 21, 2001, Newsday, Another Hijacker? Investigators focus on arrested flight student's links, by John Riley,
Dr. Clyde Lynn has met plenty of pilots in his long career as an airman, naval flight surgeon and Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner. They're usually a collegial, jocular bunch -- exchanging information, stories, scuttlebutt. But right from the start, Zacarias Moussaoui was a puzzle.
When Lynn gave him a physical on March 1 prior to the start of flight training at nearby Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., Moussaoui submitted a form saying he had been rejected for military service. Then he crossed it out when Lynn asked about it. The form also said Moussaoui had a commercial pilot license, but he was signing up for a beginner's flying course.
The space for citizenship wasn't filled in at all.
Most of all, it was Moussaoui's glum demeanor that stuck with Lynn. "Most people go into flying because it excites them,” Lynn recalls. "Most of them are enthusiastic and a little bit anxious. This guy didn't have any enthusiasm and no anxiety. He was just there. He said he was 33, but he looked 45.”
Seven months later, Moussaoui is still a puzzle.
Arrested in August for immigration violations after offering to pay thousands in cash for training on a jumbo-jet flight simulator in Minnesota, he has now become, in the eyes of many investigators, the best living clue to the Sept. 11 hijackings, a man at the convergence of virtually every major story line emanating from the catastrophe.
In his arc from a Springsteen-loving French teenager to a strict Muslim who frequented extremist circles in London, his biography traces a course similar to that of several of the 19 hijackers. He may have been an intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks, as Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested or he may know about other terror teams planning other attacks.
He had shown an interest in crop dusters, and may have information relating to anthrax attacks. With links to Afghanistan, European terror cells allegedly planning attacks on U.S. interests abroad, and three Muslim men in Norman who also have been detained, he may have key insights into how Osama bin Laden's network works. And, flagged by French intelligence as a bin Laden operative as early as 1994 and arrested in Minnesota in August, his story is an object lesson in the lack of urgency that accompanied law enforcement efforts prior to Sept. 11.
If Moussaoui is a clue, however, he is so far proving to be an indecipherable one. His interest in flight training and crop dusters links him to the Sept. 11 plots, as do reports that investigators have found that he called hijacker Mohamed Atta's apartment in Germany and received money from someone in Germany. But in other respects, he doesn't fit.
He came to the United States later than the other hijack pilots, and earlier than most of the foot soldiers in the plot. He was a North African based in Britain, while the Sept. 11 hijackers were Arabs -- from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates -- based in Germany and the Middle East. At the time Moussaoui desperately was seeking flight training, the Sept. 11 team was in the final stages of its preparation.
Moussaoui is indecipherable for another reason as well. He is one of about 700 people detained for questioning in relation to the terror attacks, and one of a smaller group held on "material witness” warrants that assert an individual is believed to have evidence and might flee if released. The FBI has revealed little about the status of those detainees, including their names or attorneys. So far, however, there is no indication that Moussaoui -- or any of the others -- have provided important cooperation about the origins or planning of the Sept. 11 operation.
"They say they have 700 in custody, and that makes you feel good,” says Ted Fraumann, a former FBI agent and partner in Business Integrity International, a Manhattan-based security consulting firm. "But then something like the anthrax scare comes along, and you say, ‘How much do we know?' They may have 700, but none of them are talking.”
Moussaoui, of Moroccan descent, was born in 1968 in St. Jean de Luz and grew up in Narbonne, a nearby town in southern France. In interviews with French and American media, both his mother and his brother have described him as a typical teenager. "He played basketball and really enjoyed the NBA,” his brother, Abd Samad Moussaoui, told CBS' "48 Hours.” "To be honest, he wore jeans, he liked music. ... He loved Bruce Springsteen.”
But his attitudes began to change after he moved to London in 1992 to learn English. When he returned, his relatives said, he brought with him increasingly fundamentalist Islamic philosophies, infusing everything from his political views to his views about women. By 1994, according to European press reports, his name had surfaced in French intelligence files when it appeared in an address book seized as part of an investigation into the murder of three French consular officials in Algeria.
And by 1999, a developing pattern of travel by Moussaoui to Pakistan, viewed by intelligence agencies as an entry point to Afghanistan, led the French counterterrorism agency to begin monitoring all of Moussaoui's travel and to ask Scotland Yard for help in monitoring his activities, according to those reports.
Officials at Norman's Airman Flight School first started hearing from Moussaoui last fall, in a series of e-mails from a British man using the name "zuluman tangotango” and asking about commercial pilot training. He called admissions director Brenda Keene "Mrs Brenda,” ended his messages with "bye bye” and was deeply concerned about financial arrangements.
"I just want to know if I do the training then I go to take the exam and I fail (hopefully I will not happen) do I have to pay anything to your school in order to get more training?” he asked in an Oct. 22 e-mail.
Earlier that summer, in July, Keene had given a tour to two Middle Eastern men -- one of whom she later identified as Mohamed Atta -- who decided to take classes elsewhere. And two years earlier, FBI agents had visited the school asking questions about a one-time Florida cab driver, Ihab Ali, who had taken flight training at the school and allegedly had been a bin Laden contact code-named "Nawawi” by some of the men accused of plotting attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
But school officials had no way of connecting "zuluman tangotango” with those encounters.
By February, Moussaoui had decided to take the cheaper, $5,000 private pilot course instead of the $20,000 commercial course, and in a Feb. 22 e-mail said he would be arriving in Chicago the next day on a flight from London.
When Moussaoui reached the school, he paid $2,500 in cash and $2,500 with a check written on an account at Arvest Bank in Norman, and was full of the same kind of questions he had in his e-mails. "He's not really the friendliest person,” Keene recalls. "He just kept asking the same questions over and over, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive.”
Lynn had the same impression. When Moussaoui arrived for his March 1 physical, he had a car. Lynn tried to get him to give a ride to another flight student, who was getting his physical at the same time but didn't have transportation back to the campus a half-mile away. Moussaoui was polite if monosyllabic throughout the physical, the doctor said, but refused to help the stranded student. "He was not wanting to be friendly,” Lynn said.
Moussaoui rented a second-floor apartment in a house close to the flight school for about $300 a month, according to downstairs neighbor Jennifer McLain, and was, again, polite but standoffish. He was sympathetic talking to his neighbors about a water leak coming from his apartment, but when McLain knocked on his door one day, he would only open it a crack.
He also began attending mosques in Norman and nearby Oklahoma City, but did not leave fond memories with some. As with his family years earlier, he had no hesitation criticizing other worshipers for their relaxed religious habits. "He was really a loner here,” says Suhaib Webb, imam at the Oklahoma City mosque. "He was very dogmatic. People did not like him here. He got mad at the Muslims. He did not think we were religious enough.”
Things didn't go much better at the flight school. Between early March and May 29, Moussaoui received 57 hours of flight training. But instructors found him unresponsive to training -- insistent on moving on to new skills before he mastered basic ones. "We kind of grounded him because he wasn't up to par,” Keene says. "They just couldn't get him up to soloing.”
He dropped out of the school on May 29, and vacated his apartment around the same time. After that, his movements are less clear. Moussaoui did sign up for a pass to a University of Oklahoma exercise facility in Norman from May through August. Some students, a university spokesman said, remember him using the weights and cardiovascular equipment.
According to some members of the Muslim community there, he found temporary housing with two other men -- Hussein al-Attas, who said he was from Saudi Arabia, and Mukarram Ali, who said he was from India. Members of the mosque understood that both were students, and they had been attending the mosque for some time before Moussaoui appeared. In mid-August, al-Attas apparently drove Moussaoui to a flight-training facility outside Minneapolis, where he sought instruction on simulators for commercial jets but attracted attention by offering cash and telling instructors he only wanted to learn to steer, but had no interest in takeoffs and landings.
Suspicious instructors notified the FBI, and Moussaoui was picked up for an immigration violation.
By Aug. 28, the French had informed U.S. officials that Moussaoui was believed to have ties to bin Laden. But the FBI was unable to get a warrant to search his computer, and Moussaoui sat in jail until Sept. 11.
Then, within hours of the hijackings, agents descended on Norman. A subsequent search of his computer and possessions, according to law enforcement sources, indicated that he had been studying crop dusters and wind dispersal patterns.
Al-Attas and Ali both were detained. In a series of newspaper interviews, another member of the local mosque, Mujahid Abdulqaadir, described them as innocent bystanders who had befriended Moussaoui, and said he was trying to arrange legal representation for the two men. But now Abdulqaadir, an American Muslim with a family and a son who played high school football in Norman, also has been taken into custody, according to mosque officials.
Ibrahim Anderson, information secretary at the Norman mosque, said all three men had good reputations, and he had heard nothing about them having extremist views. "Logistically, I think it was a stretch that any of them would be involved with the incident,” he said. "I would say that it would be very unlikely.”
Information emerging since Sept. 11, on the other hand, has only added to the suspicion surrounding Moussaoui. His interest in crop dusting appeared to parallel hijacker Atta's inquiries about crop dusters in Florida early this year. His use of the University of Oklahoma gym this summer paralleled several of the hijackers, who bought gym memberships in Florida and Maryland and worked out over the summer.
Investigators also have discovered, according to European and American press reports, that Moussaoui made at least one phone call while he was attending flight school in Norman, to a roommate of hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi in Hamburg, Germany. German police have issued arrest warrants for two men who lived with those hijackers -- Said Bahaji and Ramzi Binalshibh -- and identified them as key members of the cell that carried out the hijackings. And they have identified two wire transfers totalling $15,000 from Western Union offices in Germany to Moussaoui in Norman in early August, just before he went to Minnesota for simulator training.
One widely shared theory, advanced by Cheney in a television interview recently, is that Moussaoui was intended to be a member of the team that hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 out of Newark -- the only plane on which a team of four, rather than five, hijackers has been identified.
But that skyjacking crew had a trained pilot, Ziad Samir Jarrah. Moussaoui, based on information uncovered so far, had no known intersection with any other hijackers while he was in the United States, and his behavior in Norman -- emphasizing strict fundamentalism at the local mosques -- ran counter to other hijackers' efforts to blend in. Some law enforcement professionals tie him in with intelligence obtained after Sept. 11 suggesting that as many as six hijackings may have been planned.
The hijackers' connections to Moussaoui may be as important as his particular role in their plans. In Britain, while drawing welfare benefits and studying economics, Moussaoui also was linked to two mosques that have been hotbeds of organizing for radical Islamic groups, including a North African group known as Takfir Wal Hijra.
Some members of the London mosques have been tied to planned attacks in the United States and the Mideast during the year 2000 celebration, including Ahmed Ressam, who confessed to an attempted attack on Los Angeles International Airport, and Abu Doha, who has been indicted in that same plot.
And in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, a wave of 14 arrests in Europe broke up a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris that was centered on a cell of the Takfir group headed by Djamel Beghal, a former worshiper at those same mosques. Beghal, detained two months earlier after leaving Afghanistan, had told French investigators that he had been ordered by a top bin Laden lieutenant to set the plot in motion. One of the men arrested, according to British press reports, had lived with Moussaoui in London. Beghal has now retracted his confession.
As a result, much of the investigation of Moussaoui is now focused overseas. A woman he lived with in London is being sought for questioning. The French judge who is overseeing the Beghal case opened a probe last week into Moussaoui's terrorist connections. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that French authorities have found that Moussaoui reported his passport lost three times in the late 1990s in an apparent attempt to get a passport for travel to the United States that would not include suspicious visas from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Terrorism experts say Moussaoui's link to both the Sept. 11 hijackers and a broader European network is one of the clearest indications that the Sept. 11 attacks were not launched by a discrete group organized along ethnic or geographic lines, like a single organized crime family, but were part of a broader offensive by an alliance of groups that are sharing skills and members through a complex network of informal relationships bonded by bin Laden's militant doctrines.
"It is no longer appropriate to try to dissect it and say one cell is tied to another, because a greater harm is coming from the doctrine and the preaching of it,” says Lee Colwell, a former deputy director of the FBI. "It's like a cancer that metastasizes in your body. Medical science doesn't have a way of dealing with that."
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November 8, 2001 [1st capture] BBC News, Anthrax Fact File: Dispersing Anthrax,
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November 17, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at ’96 Olympics; Safety: Crop-dusters and jets within hundreds of miles of the Atlanta Games were tracked, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak,
November 17, 2001, Orlando Sentinel, U.S. Prepared For Attacks From Air In '96 Olympics, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak, Washington bureau,
WASHINGTON -- Five years before the World Trade Center towers toppled, U.S. authorities had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, taking elaborate steps to avert an attack from the air during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps since, Black Hawk helicopters and U.S. Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues, officials said. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.
November 17, 2001, Los Angeles Times, Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at ’96 Olympics; Safety: Crop-dusters and jets within hundreds of miles of the Atlanta Games were tracked, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak,
WASHINGTON — Five years before the World Trade Center towers toppled, U.S. authorities had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, taking elaborate steps to avert an attack from the air during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps ever since, Black Hawk helicopters and U.S. Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues, officials said. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.
Law enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia "to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one of the venues," said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta office at the time.
While no one suggests that the Olympics security precautions could have been a blueprint to prevent attacks, the revelations raise questions about whether more could have been done in the ensuing years to tighten aviation security. The aftermath of Sept. 11 has brought calls for increased airport security, tighter restrictions on crop-dusters and closer monitoring of foreign students who attend U.S. flight schools.
"In hindsight," said Johnson, who retired from the FBI in 1997, "it's probably one of those things you think about at the time and then you move on to the next operation."
The Atlanta experience also points out the difficulty of stopping a determined terrorist: An attack took place, but on the ground. A bomb was detonated at a crowded Olympic concert, despite tightened security. One person was killed, 100 were injured and the prime suspect, a home-grown extremist, remains at large.
At the time, there was no specific threat from any particular terrorist group, said Steve Simon, who was the National Security Council's senior director for transnational threats during the Olympics. Concerns were based in part on a classified 200-page FBI "Terrorist Threat Assessment" on the 1996 Olympics distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement officials before the Games. The document made no mention of Osama bin Laden or his Al Qaeda network in a list of potential terrorist organizations, according the former federal officials familiar with the report.
Describing the Games as "an excellent opportunity for terrorists," the threat assessment analyzed an estimated 80 nations, including Afghanistan, where Bin Laden had recently relocated. The report described that nation as a haven for terrorist training camps, along with neighboring Pakistan.
The FBI, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials already had identified Bin Laden as a growing terrorist threat to the U.S. They also knew that at least one terrorist sympathetic to Bin Laden's anti-American cause, a Pakistani who trained in terror camps in Pakistan and at flight schools in the United States, had planned to hijack a U.S. airliner and crash it into CIA headquarters in Virginia.
In fact, the federal grand jury that ultimately indicted Bin Laden in New York in 1998 for conspiring to destroy U.S. national facilities, launched its probe of him and Al Qaeda in June 1996, just a month before the July 19 Olympic opening ceremony in Atlanta. The Saudi Arabian government already had revoked Bin Laden's passport, and, just two months before the Games, the U.S. succeeded in pressuring Sudan to expel him as a security threat.
"We certainly knew that Al Qaeda was interested in getting biological weapons and chemical weapons [at the time]," added another former NSC official, who asked not to be identified. "The problem was not so much weaponization as distribution. That's what crop-dusters do. It was fairly obvious."
But Johnson, the former FBI official, said that when planning security for the 1996 Games, he had no specific information about Bin Laden and his organization, or about the alleged kamikaze plot.
"We were just thinking about possibilities of what bad guys could do," he said. "What if someone takes a private airplane and puts explosives in it or loads it with gas and crashes it into the stadium? We didn't have any history of anything like that. They were just precautionary measures."
_______________________________________________________________________________November 17, 2001, Orlando Sentinel, U.S. Prepared For Attacks From Air In '96 Olympics, by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak, Washington bureau,
WASHINGTON -- Five years before the World Trade Center towers toppled, U.S. authorities had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, taking elaborate steps to avert an attack from the air during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps since, Black Hawk helicopters and U.S. Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues, officials said. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.
Law-enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia "to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one of the venues," said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta office at the time.
Although no one suggests that the Olympics security precautions could have been a blueprint to prevent future attacks, the revelations raise questions about whether more could have been done in the ensuing years to tighten aviation security. The aftermath of Sept. 11 has brought calls for increased airport security, tighter restrictions on crop-dusters and closer monitoring of foreign students who attend U.S. flight schools.
"In hindsight," said Johnson, who retired from the FBI in 1997, "it's probably one of those things you think about at the time, and then you move on to the next operation."
The Atlanta experience also points up the difficulty of stopping a determined terrorist: An attack took place, but on the ground. A bomb was detonated at a crowded Olympics concert, despite tightened security. One person was killed, 100 were injured and the prime suspect, a home-grown extremist, remains at large.
At the time, there was no specific threat from any particular terrorist group, said Steve Simon, the National Security Council's senior director for transnational threats during the Olympics. Concerns were based in part on a classified, 200-page FBI "Terrorist Threat Assessment" on the 1996 Olympics distributed to federal, state and local law-enforcement officials before the Games. The document made no mention of Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaeda network in a list of potential terrorist organizations.
November 19, 2001, The Wall Street Journal, Hijackers' Interest in Crop Dusters Still Puzzles Terrorism Investigators, by John J. Fialka, Tom Hamburger and Gary Fields, Staff Reporters,
WASHINGTON -- Seven months before he crashed an airliner into the World Trade Center, Mohamed Atta was asking crop dusters in Florida an odd question about their planes: How far can they fly?
Such aircraft normally aren't flown long distances. But this summer, a Middle Eastern man who gave his name as "Sam" hung around crop-dusting firms in Saskatchewan, Canada, for days -- and asked the same question. And sometime before he was arrested in August, suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui did crop-dusting research on his computer.
The interest shown in crop dusting by the Sept. 11 hijackers and possible associates is one of the enduring mysteries of the recent terrorist attacks. Once discovered, it caused the first major post-Sept. 11 scare and prompted authorities to ground crop dusters for five days.
Yet two months later, investigators still don't know what these men were up to, despite thousands of interviews in the U.S. and Canada about their ventures into agricultural aviation. Were terrorists planning to spread anthrax from a crop duster? That would be very difficult to do effectively, because anthrax droplets need to be small enough to float, and crop dusters are designed to spray droplets that don't. Perhaps they wanted to load a crop duster's 800-gallon pesticide tank with another harmful agent, investigators speculate; or maybe they wanted to load a plane with explosives and crash it into something. Several strange inquiries, all along similar lines, have raised such concerns among authorities.
Mr. Atta's first known crop-dusting visit came in February. He and two other men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin drove to the municipal airport in Belle Glade, Fla., near Lake Okeechobee, and walked into South Florida Crop Care's hanger. James Lester, who cleans and loads crop dusters for the company, says Mr. Atta pointedly quizzed him about how much fuel and chemicals the planes could hold, and became pushy when Mr. Lester rebuffed his requests to sit in one of the planes. Finally, after Mr. Atta followed so closely behind that "he stepped on my heel," Mr. Lester told him he was too busy to talk anymore.
Later that month, Mr. Atta went to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Credit Service office in Homestead, south of Miami, and inquired about borrowing money to buy a crop duster, people familiar with the matter say. He was told to check with the nearby Community Bank of Florida, which later received a call from someone who wanted to buy a crop duster -- an unusual request, since few farms use crop dusters in the area.
Several weeks later, a man that South Florida Crop Care general manager J.D. "Will" Lee believes was Mr. Atta returned to that airfield. This time, he wanted to know how far a crop duster could fly on a tank of gas, Mr. Lee recalls. "Nobody asks about the range of crop dusters -- it doesn't make any sense," says Mr. Lee, who related his account to the FBI.
Mr. Atta and various men, apparently Middle Eastern, made repeated visits to the airfield throughout the spring and summer, employees there say. They usually stood off at a distance to watch crop dusters being loaded, taking off and landing, once videotaping them.
In March, Mr. Atta and a man investigators suspect was Marwan al-Shehhi -- the other hijacker-pilot who crashed into the World Trade Center -- landed a small plane at an airport near tiny Copperhill, Tenn., by the Georgia border. Danny Whitener, a pilot, says Mr. Atta questioned him -- again, in an aggressive manner -- about a nearby chemical plant that he had just flown over, asking what chemicals were there. Informed that it was mostly empty, Mr. Atta became angry and accused Mr. Whitener of lying, Mr. Whitener says. He also asked Mr. Whitener about a nearby dam and two nearby electric power plants, both of them nuclear.
A month later, Mr. Atta and a companion returned by car, says John Rutkosky, then the airport's manager. This time, Mr. Atta asked Mr. Rutkosky about the range and fuel capacity of a British-made Hawker jet and a Gulfstream turboprop parked there.
In Canada, a Middle Eastern man started showing up at crop-duster businesses in June, first visiting Farmair Ltd., in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he spoke to owner Norm Colhoun. He had an Arab-sounding name, but the men he encountered cannot remember it; they said he told them to call him Sam. Mr. Colhoun says the man asked for a pilot's job, claiming to have flown crop dusters in Syria and Russian passenger jets. Told there were no openings, he hung around for the day, observing and asking "funny questions" -- including the planes' range, says Mr. Colhoun.
Later in June, the same man turned up 60 miles south at Arndt Air Ltd., a crop-dusting company in Weyburn. It didn't have any pilot openings, either, but he showed up every day for a week, says maintenance director Dan McGonigle. Messrs. McGonigle and Mr. Colhoun compared recollections, and both concluded they'd encountered the same man. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are continuing to look for him.
"He watched what we did, how we operated," recalls Mr. McGonigle, who figured Sam was "an airport bum" who liked to hang around airplanes. The company offered him a job as a ground-crew member, but he was only interested in a pilot's job. After studying flight manuals he found lying around, he persuaded company officials to let him fly a crop duster. But as Sam taxied onto the runway, it was obvious he was having trouble steering. Halfway down the runway, he stopped, jumped out and ran into a nearby grass field, Mr. McGonigle says.
Meanwhile, Mr. Moussaoui was trying to learn to fly in Norman, Okla. A French citizen of Moroccan descent, he had paid Airman Flight School $5,000 in February for a three-month course. Investigators since have determined that he was in contact with suspected terrorists overseas at the time. At some point, he downloaded a complete crop-dusting manual onto his laptop computer, including information about wind patterns and chemical dispersal. On Aug. 17, after he aroused suspicions at a flight school near Minneapolis for insisting on paying $8,300 in cash to learn to fly a Boeing 747 before he knew how to fly a small plane, the FBI arrested Mr. Moussaoui on immigration charges. He remains in custody in New York as a material witness in the hijacking investigation; his lawyer's identity isn't known.
In Florida, Mr. Atta continued visiting South Florida Crop Care. Then, in late summer, he went to a Delray Beach pharmacy in search of treatment for reddened, burning hands, which pharmacist Greg Chatterton says appeared irritated by chemicals, though Mr. Atta wouldn't say what had happened. Mr. Lee, the Belle Glade crop duster, says Mr. Atta's last visit was several days before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Right around that time, Mr. Colhoun in Saskatchewan received a strange call. It wasn't Sam, Mr. Colhoun says, but his accent was similar. The caller was inquiring about a crop duster Mr. Colhoun had for sale. Among the questions: "How far will this fly on a tank of gas?"
Mr. McGonigle says Sam himself called on Sept. 15 and said he was just checking in. When Mr. McGonigle mentioned the terrorist attacks, he says, Sam only mumbled in response. After a bit more small talk, the call ended. Sam hasn't called back since.
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February 20, 2002, The Southeast Missourian, No Anthrax Threat; Crop-dusters ready to return to skies, preparing equipment for season, by Scott Welton, Standard Democrat,
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April 4, 2002, USA Today, Growing season signals caution, by Patrick O'Driscoll, diigo,
ST. MARYS, Kan. — As spring greens the farms of America, there is more than seasonal bird song in the air.
Agricultural spray planes are dive-bombing croplands, from vegetable farms and orchards on the coasts to grain fields and pastures in the Midwest.
But almost seven months after the Sept. 11 attacks touched off alarms about potential "terrorist crop-dusters," the buzz from above can still turn heads and prompt calls to the local sheriff or airfield. Is that odd little aerobatic plane with the extra wing spraying fertilizer, weed killer and pesticide — or anthrax?
"It got a little carried away," says Scott Heinen, 29, co-owner of Nemaha Valley Aerial, a two-plane outfit just north of this small town near the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. "It will take more education to downplay this terrorist 9/11 deal."
So agricultural aviators have begun public relations campaigns that aim to reassure suburban and rural neighbors still on edge about potential airborne mayhem.
Three times last September, officials grounded all crop-dusting planes. Investigators say Mohamed Atta, suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, twice asked in Florida about how to fly a spray plane. They also found a computer disk with information about crop-dusting in the belongings of Zaccarias Moussaoui, who is awaiting trial on charges that he was part of the al-Qaeda conspiracy that resulted in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Like most of the nation's roughly 2,900 "aerial applicators," as crop-dusting services prefer to be called, Heinen ramped up security after Sept. 11. He and others met with law enforcement agencies. Some sought increased patrols. Others acquainted police and other emergency officials with what crop-dusters do and how, when and where they do it.
Now, some agricultural aviation groups are broadcasting announcements. "You may be hearing aerial applicators firing up their planes in the early morning darkness," says a radio ad by the Kansas Agricultural Aviation Association. "These professionals are flying on behalf of your food supply."
The National Agricultural Aviation Association is giving "talking points" to its members. They stress that greater security and the complexity of operating spray planes make a terrorist incident unlikely.
"We're going to have a little bit of paranoia out there as airplanes start flying again in the growing season," says operator Pat Kornegay of San Benito, Texas, the national group's president. "But ... it's probably an opportunity for us. Our business is largely misunderstood, especially by urban people who don't make the connection between our aircraft and the food on their table."
With a single-wing Piper Pawnee and a yellow Grumman AgCat biplane in his hangar, Heinen has posted security signs, installed video cameras and asked police to drive by on nights and weekends. "I'm not worried about terrorists," he says. "But I am worried that something crazy could shut it down again."
While the FBI interviewed every air-spraying service in the country in September, fliers lost an estimated $40 million in business. A bigger worry was public perception that airborne terrorists might douse people with poison or disease.
In October, a Coast Guard post in Natchez, Miss., reported a plane dropping white granules, stoking fears of anthrax. That same month, a barge towboat and a private craft on the Mississippi River reportedly were sprayed with an unknown substance.
James Callan, executive director for the national agricultural aviators, says the granules apparently came from a paper plant, and the spray was a puff from a "smoker" device used to gauge wind direction.
A sheriff in Arkansas also reported "this big green plane had just sprayed the town," says Ron Harrodof the Arkansas Agricultural Aviation Association. It was an Air Force C-130, its engines smoking. "That was the type of hysteria," he adds. "We're going to try to bridge that gap of credibility."
The industry long has had to defend itself to those asking whether what's being sprayed is hazardous. What if a terrorist in a loaded plane dumped agricultural chemicals?
Kornegay says the fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides "are not capable of creating any kind of large-scale public health problem. They are biodegradable compounds. They are very safe around humans."
But he and other applicators say terrorism via crop-duster is remote and impractical for other, more basic reasons.
Crop-dusters are hard to start and harder to fly. The planes have a tail-wheel configuration unfamiliar to most pilots. Handling also is tricky, especially when the planes are loaded for spraying.
"They actually are aerodynamically unstable," Kornegay says. "And you can't just go rent one like a Cessna 150."
Spraying mechanisms are so finely tuned that a terrorist would have to reconfigure them to accommodate his poisons, an even more unlikely scenario. And crop-spray hoppers aren't pressurized and couldn't deliver poison gas.
Even if a powdered agent such as anthrax were tossed from a plane, spores as tiny and fine as those in last fall's anthrax attacks "probably would go upward in the atmosphere, not down," Kornegay says.
Agricultural aviators' biggest precaution since Sept. 11 has been security. In Kansas, agricultural flier Dan Barker of Goodland has added a basic security step once unthinkable out here: He removes the key from his plane's ignition.
"I never took the key out until Sept. 12," says Barker, a 31-year veteran crop sprayer.
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August 21, 2009, Lemars Daily Sentinel [Iowa] Working at 180 mph: Crop duster tells his story, by Magdalene Landegent,
Jeff Summersill's yellow airplane has been painting the skies and fields around Le Mars for the past week.
A crop duster from Florida, Summersill is on his second summer in Iowa.
The summer gets slower in Florida for crop dusting, he explained.
He came last year for a few weeks to help Iowa crop dusting companies. This year he came for about six weeks.
When weather is right, Summersill has been flying daylight to dark, spraying local corn fields with fungicide and soybean fields with pesticide for aphids.
His plane, an Air Tractor 602, sprays at 180 mph.
To spray, he flies about 5 feet above the crops.
Jeff Summersill washes bugs off of his Air Tractor crop dusting plane. He had to wait out some stormy weather this week before finishing Le Mars area fields.
"You better be paying attention. You'd better be well rested. You've got to be concentrating on what you're doing," Summersill said. "You're always thinking about the move that's 500 feet ahead of you."
The concentration alone can be exhausting, he said.
Before he sprays a field, Summersill circles it a few times to get a mental picture of what the lay of the land is like and what obstacles he'll meet.
"Around here, the elevation in a field will go up and down three or four times," he said.
The sugarcane fields, orange groves and celery fields he's used to in Florida are much flatter.
He sprays the field in an upwind fashion to avoid breathing in too much of whatever he's spraying.
Taking several passes at a field means a lot of quick turnarounds.
"Some people like to do the air show thing," Summersill said.
He prefers to keep it less risky. Although, when his spray tank is light, he doesn't mind flying a little fancy.
"Also, the turns give me a half second to look at the engine instruments and spend time feeling how the airplane is doing -- is everything running smoothly like it's supposed to," Summersill said.
Several of the crop duster accidents around Iowa have been due to engine failure, he said.
With about 9,000 hours of flying under his belt, Summersill knows his airplane like many people know their cars.
His plane has a tiny cab, not even big enough to take his 8- and 10-year-old daughters for a ride.
Everything is just within reach, and, with his helmet on, there's about 6 inches clearance on either side of his head and about 1 foot from the roof.
Summersill started flying as an 18 year old.
He's the third in a family business that stretches three generations.
"My grandfather Thomas Ray Summersill started our business in Florida in the late 1950s," Summersill said.
Now Summersill's father flies and his grandfather still handles some of the business work on the ground. His brother also runs a lot of the ground operations.
Summersill got serious about working as a crop duster immediately after high school.
"I've just always been around it," Summersill said. "My dad and my grandpa had taken me for rides."
Things have changed since his grandfather started spraying fields in a 1940s biplane.
"My grandpa did everything by line of sight, and now we have GPS," Summersill said. "GPS helps us be more efficient and have proper application in the fields."
Efficiency is important when you're spraying 2,800 acres a day.
The 630-gallon tank for spraying on his plane means, around Iowa, that he'll be able to spray for about 1 1/2 hours before returning to the airport to refill.
"Mostly around here we're spraying about 2 gallons an acre. But at home in Florida it can be up to 15 gallons an acre," Summersill said. "That means every six or seven minutes you're back at the airport."
That's a lot of takeoffs and landings.
"We appreciate local airports. They play a vital role in farmers being able to protect their crops," Summersill said.
On just about every job, Summersill sees people snapping photos of him and watching him fly.
"You're under a lot of scrutiny from the public," he said of his job. "We're very interested in doing it the proper way."
He also urged people not to park near a crop dusting site.
"It adds stress to the pilot, and he might not even be able to finish the field if you're there," he explained.
Some people say you have to be half daredevil to work as a crop duster.
Summersill doesn't think so.
Though it has its challenges, Summersill doesn't even call his job dangerous.
"If you think about it, we drive on a two-lane road at 55 mph with someone coming at us from the opposite way at 55 mph," he said. "So you're talking about a 110 mph impact possibility, and you have no control of the other person."
You take the danger out of crop dusting by being prepared, knowing your plane, watching the weather, and knowing the field, he said.
"It's a lot of hard work, a lot of training," Summersill said. "We do so much education now -- many courses every year."
He even teaches courses himself in Florida.
To crop dust in Iowa, Summersill first had to study and pass a license test.
"A lot of us are licensed in many states," he said. "I have licenses for four states."
At 35, Summersill is fairly young for a crop dusting pilot.
"There's a demand for young pilots," he said. "Only about 3,200 pilots in the country do this.
He encourages people who are interested in the field to visit the National Agricultural Aviation Association's site on the Internet atwww.agaviation.org.
Summersill loves flying, and he loves his job.
"I feel like I get paid to do all the paperwork," Summersill said. "I wouldn't trade this job for anything. I can think of a lot worse ways to spend your day."
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The AT-602 is designed for operators who need more than 500 gallons, but less than the 800 gallon AT-802. It only takes one load to spray a 125 acre circle at 5 gallons per acre, and ferry times are shortened by the powerful PT6A-60AG engine. It's the perfect match of hopper capacity to engine performance, and it allows operators to go from a multi-plane to single plane operation for lower overhead and increased profits.
Hopper capacity: 630 U.S. gallons
Fuel capacity: 216 U.S. gallons
Wikipedia - Air Tractor
Air Tractor Inc. is a United States aircraft manufacturer based in Olney, Texas. Leland Snow founded the company in 1978 in order to manufacture a new agricultural aircraft derived from the S-2B aircraft (designed by his previous company Snow Aeronautical)
TERRORISTS COMING FROM THE NORTH IN CROP DUSTING PLANES?
compiled by Dee Finney
ALERT ISSUED FOR STOLEN CROP-DUSTER
The Transportation Security Administration has issued an advisory that a Piper PA 25 Pawnee crop-dusting aircraft (similar in appearance to the aircraft shown above) was stolen from Ejido Queretaro, near Mexicali, Mexico, on November 1st, 2004.
"Although there is currently no indication that this has any connection to terrorist activity," the TSA said, "the theft is cause for concern. Past information indicates that members of al-Qaeda may have planned -- or may still be planning -- to disperse biological or chemical agents from cropdusting aircraft."
The stolen aircraft is registered in Mexico and bears the tail number XBCYP. If you see the aircraft, the TSA says you should immediately contact the TSA General Aviation Hotline at (866) 427-3287, or contact your nearest office of the FBI.
Defoliating with Agent Orange - the granddaddy of all crop dusters.
ICL Biogema APPLICATIONS AÉRIENNES
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Hawaii State Archives Digital Collections,
Loading crop duster airplane with Dichlorophenoxy- acetic acid,
Sgt. Truman P. Taylor (U.S. Air Corps) with airplane he built in basement of his home.
This is one of America's smallest planes with a 20 foot wing span, flies 70 mph, and climbs 3,000 feet.
Airplane spraying harvested sugar cane field.
Airplane spraying harvested sugar cane field.
Martin Bomber and M.B. 3A airplanes, date: ca. 1924
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