The jointly-funded government effort picked up the tab for Atta on sojourns in Cairo, Istanbul, and Aleppo in Syria during the years 1994 and 1995, as well as employing him as a “tutor” and “seminar participant” during 1996 and 1997.
Moreover Atta’s financial relationship with the U.S.—German government effort may even extend back to his initial move from Egypt to Germany in 1992, after being “recruited” in Cairo by a mysterious German couple dubbed the “hijacker’s sponsors” in a recent news account in the Chicago Tribune.
Mohamed Atta, before becoming a ‘terrorist ringleader,’ enjoyed the patronage of a government initiative, known as the “Congress-Bundestag Program," overseen by the U.S. State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the German equivalent of the U.S. Agency currently supervising the secretive bidding race for tens of billions of dollars of post-war reconstruction contracts in Iraq, the Agency for International Development.
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