Michael Berg has insisted to the press that pure coincidence put his son Nick in the presence of a comrade to Zacarias Moussaoui, and I am not the sort of person who wishes to doubt the word of a grieving father. Still, we're dealing here with a really interesting coincidence.
According to CNN (see link in the post below), Berg met an acquaintance of Moussaoui's while riding a bus. (In an earlier post, I erroneously said that Berg met Moussaoui himself.) At the time, he "was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport." This places the pair in Norman, Oklahoma, also the location of the Airman Flight School.
Berg gave the man access to his laptop computer, and even -- in what we are supposed to accept as an act of flabbergasting naivete -- divulged his email password. This password apparently was passed around by the terrorists, who used Berg's account.
One interesting aspect of the CNN story: Michael Berg's quotations seem to tell a story at a slight variance from the gist of the article, which speaks only of a connection to Moussaoui's comrade. The elder Berg, however, says something rather different -- that his son had run into "some terrorist people -- who no one knew were terrorists at the time." Note the use of the plural, which indicates that the bus encounter was not the only time Nick Berg ran into underground Al Qaeda operatives.
A story on Berg published in the Philadelphia Daily News of May 14 tells much the same story related in the CNN account, but the story published the day before includes these words: "He'd made some contact with Arab kids at the University of Oklahoma - that's what the FBI was checking into..." Again, this wording would indicate that the encounters with Arabs were rather more extensive than one meeting on a bus.
We might here paraphrase Fleming: "Accidentally" running into one or two terrorists is coincidence; three is enemy action.
(A side note: An Al Qaeda operative named Ihab Mohammed Ali attended this flight school in 1999. One wonders who Moussaoui's partner was, and how many other Al Qaeda sympathizers were in that location at that time.)
I am not the only one who has toyed with the possibility that an intelligence agency recruited Berg; for reasons given in previous posts, any agency would want a man of his caliber. If such a recruitment took place, the parents may not have known about it. This theory may seem extreme, but once we grant the possibility, we may inch closer to an explanation for some of the nagging "sub-mysteries" surrounding this affair -- for example, the FBI's curious inquiries, the strangeness involving the passport, Berg's refusal to register his company, his odd choice of reading material at the time of capture, his interest in Arabic (unusual in a Pennsylvania tech worker), and his odd behavior after his release.
Who might have recruited him? It is known that Berg had visited Israel. There have been many reports indicating that ad hoc teams of Mossad helpers (not full-fledged agents, which have always been few in number) were tracking Al Qaeda members in the United States prior to September 11. A little careful Googling will divulge a number of relevant stories. Some of these stories indicate that the FBI has long known about these activities, but considers the matter too sensitive for discussion.
In this light, I would like to know the name of the email service used by Berg -- and therefore by Moussaoui and company.
For example, Commtouch -- an Israeli firm then run by the daughter of known Mossad asset Robert Maxwell -- offers email services. That firm could have easily tracked any Al Qaeda operatives in the United States using their services -- if the company knew which password the terrorists used.
The trick, of course, would be convincing the bad guys to use that password. At this point, one would need the services of a field agent.
Have I speculated beyond the limits of the available facts? Probably. Still, keep this scenario in mind. Further facts may buttress or undermine it.
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