German Intelligence Expert Refutes U.S. Version of 9-11

January 9, 2002

A former German intelligence chief refutes the official version of what happened on Sept. 11, questioning why Congress hasn't called for a special inquiry to investigate what really occurred on that terrible day.

The German newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, recently interviewed Andreas von Bülow, the former head of the parliamentary commission that oversees the German secret services, about the terror attacks of Sept. 11. Von Bülow, who I interviewed in early December, said the provocative Tagesspiegel interview published on Jan. 13, was the first time the German press had asked him about the problems surrounding the attacks.

"The planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement—to hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers," said von Bülow. "This is unthinkable, without years of support from state intelligence services."

This led the interviewer to call von Bülow "a conspiracy theorist."

"Yeah, yeah, that's the ridicule from those who prefer to follow the official, politically correct line," von Bülow responded. "Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda and disinformation. Anyone who doubts the official line is called crazy."

Despite the controversial content of von Bülow's recent comments, "there has been no response in the German press," von Bülow told me. "The media has to ask the questions," he said, "Ashcroft and Bush—they are the officials who have to answer the questions." Since Sept. 11, "public opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong," von Bülow said. "I wonder why so many questions have not been asked. Normally, with such a terrible event, various leads and trails appear and are discussed by the investigators, the media and the government: 'Is there something here or not? Are the explanations plausible?' In this case, that is not happening at all."

Before a government goes to war, it must first establish who the enemy is, von Bülow said. "It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission, it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court." Concerning the video evidence, von Bülow said: "When one is dealing with intelligence services, one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality. Hollywood could provide these techniques. I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence."

Von Bülow, who controlled the budgets of German intelligence from 1969 to 1994, cannot understand why Congress has not opened a formal investigation into the attacks and the failure of American intelligence agencies to prevent them. "There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A. with a budget of $30 billion, which were not able to prevent the attacks," von Bülow said. "Officially, there is nothing." he said. "They say that they didn't have any idea that this would happen." While four planes had been hijacked "for more than 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies kept the fighter planes on the ground," von Bülow said. "However, 48 hours later, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within 10 days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.

"Why has the director of the FBI not taken a position regarding these contradictions? Where did the list come from, why it was false? If I were the chief investigator in such a case, I would go before the public on a regular basis, and provide information on which leads are valid and which are not," he said, "and what about the obscure stock transactions? In the week prior to the attacks, the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines, United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200 percent. It was for a value of $15 billion. Some people must have known something. Who?"

ISRAEL KNEW?

Although von Bülow told me in December 2001 that he believes that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, is behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he said such political discussion is beyond the pale in German journalism. When asked by Tagesspiegel who might have known about the attacks, von Bülow's comments about apparent Israeli culpability and the agenda of Israel's Ariel Sharon were deleted. Israel is protected in the German media, in which any criticism of the Jewish state is stifled. This is because of "the special relationship" between the two states. However, the Israeli agenda has advanced as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Don't believe the Arabs—they are foes," is the message behind the "brainwashing" being done by the U.S. government and the unquestioning mass media, said von Bülow. "With the help of the horrifying attacks, the Western mass democracies are being subjected to brainwashing. The enemy image of anti-communism doesn't work anymore; it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief. They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism."

The image of the new enemy comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence and foreign policy, von Bülow said. "Already in the middle of the 1990s, Huntington believed, people in Europe and the U.S. needed someone they could hate—this would strengthen their identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog, as adviser to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S. to seize all the raw materials of the world, especially oil and gas. "In his analysis of political processes," von Bülow said, "a global map of civil wars and conflicts coincides with the locations of these strategic minerals. The same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade," he said.

The huge raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union, as well as the pipeline routes, are now at the disposal of the United States and Britain. The fact that the events of Sept. 11 "fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic complex," von Bülow says, is "conspicuous."

"What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes," von Bülow said. He is the author of Im Namen des Staates, a book which documents some of the criminal activities of the CIA and the German intelligence services.

Von Bülow, told me that "95 percent of the work of intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation," and pointed to the false leads that were apparently planted to incriminate Arab terrorists in the attacks. These leads, he said, were like tracks left behind by "a herd of stampeding elephants." The abundance of such obvious clues, such as Mohammed Atta's passport, which mysteriously survived the crash and explosion that allegedly destroyed the shock- and fire-proof cockpit recorders, were like the German children's' game Schnitzeljagd, or Schnitzel Hunt, in which small bits of paper are left behind as clues for the children, von Bülow said. Atta's passport, which he had reported as having been stolen long before Sept. 11, amazingly reappeared unburned and intact on top of a pile of rubble near the World Trade Center, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Atta, the suspected leader, allegedly left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center. "If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation, it's really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane that would reach Boston such a short time before the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late, he would not have been on the plane that was hijacked. Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this?" von Bülow said.

"They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind a rented car with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fell into the hands of the FBI, because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed." Clues were left behind, like in Schnitzeljagd, which "were meant to be followed," he said.

Von Bülow compared Sept. 11 with first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. "In the middle was the bomb maker, a former Egyptian officer," von Bülow said. "He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were sneaked into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant. And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder. The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The official story of the crime was quickly found—the criminals were evil Muslims," von Bülow said.

When asked what he would do, von Bülow said: "My task is concluded by saying it could not have happened that way. Search for the truth."