20th Anniversary: Confusing days in the wake of a tragedy

Tuesdays were quiet days at The Prague Post back in 2001. We put the paper to bed Monday evening. Tuesdays were spent casually casting about for the next week's stories.

Such it was Sept. 11 that year. I was the only news reporter around - my colleagues, a couple, were vacationing in Italy. I learned two planes had just hit the Twin Towers, but the full implications didn't occur to me until I was on the phone a few minutes later with political analyst Jiří Pehe.

"Two planes on one day. Is it really a coincidence?" he asked. My eyes went wide.

The Americans on staff fast-walked to the Radisson down the street, where a manager kindly lent us a room with a TV. We watched the towers fall, live on CNN. Everyone else burst into tears. I could only think about how to cover the most important event of my lifetime - alone.

First came gathering reactions on the street. But expats lived in their own bubble. Before I could interview Americans drinking at The Globe, I first had to break the news to them. Most simply refused to believe it.

Czechs were better able to deal with the immediate reality. The larger consequences for them were revealed only the next day, when NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter for the first time - declaring an attack on one member an attack on all. The Czech Republic had joined the alliance only two years prior. For the first time, it hit home to a majority of Czechs that their alliance with the United States could hold unforeseen, even terrible, consequences.

Our sources over the next two weeks seem prophetic today. An expert from the Interior Ministry saw a new era of global terror, where Arab suicide bombings become meshed with intelligence-based European terrorism. An Army colonel and an official with the Afghan government-in-exile both warned that invading Afghanistan would bring about inescapable catastrophe.

But no one predicted Prague would become a political football kicked around for three years by U.S. neo-conservatives to justify an invasion of Iraq. Aiding those efforts was a defensive and often inept Czech leadership pumping out a continuous stream of contradictory information.

Within days of the attacks, Western media and the Czech-language press were quoting murky sources as claiming hijacker Mohamed Atta had visited Prague in May 2000 and April 2001 - the second time, allegedly, to meet with an Iraqi agent. Some said Atta had come to pick up anthrax spores. Others said it was travel documents. Prime Minister Miloš Zeman went on CNN to declare the two were actually plotting to blow up Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty.

The Prague Post quoted high-ranking diplomats and terrorism experts who cast serious doubt on Atta's alleged "Prague connection." But foreign reporters descended on the city in numbers unseen since the Velvet Revolution. The pressure built until baby-faced Interior Minister Stanislav Gross - clearly in over his head - held a disastrous news conference in October 2001. Hammered for details, Gross angrily insisted Atta had been in Prague but failed to produce any evidence. At the same time, he denounced Western reporters for painting Prague as a hub of international terrorism.

The absurdity only grew in the following months. Credible sources fled the story like a house on fire, but the canard was kept alive by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and a handful of conservative columnists. As late as May 2002, a spokesman for Zeman told The Prague Post the government stood by its version - long after the FBI and CIA had told the White House that the story didn't add up. The legend wasn't finally put to rest until July 2004, when the 9/11 Commission report said there had been no reason for such a meeting to take place and no evidence that it ever had.

The root of the confusion could have been lifted straight from The Good Soldier Svejk. In September 2004, reports in the Czech and U.S. press finally revealed that a passenger with a similar name had flown to Prague, setting off the epic mix-up. According to The Chicago Tribune, he was a Pakistani businessman named Mohammed Atta.

They simply had the wrong foreigner.

- The author was a former copy editor, culture editor and news reporter with The Prague Post. He is now a reporter with The Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

James Pitkin can be reached at
news@praguepost.com