When we think of Mohamed Atta, we picture the cold-eyed ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, a man who steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on that catastrophic Tuesday in 2001. But Parallax 9/11: The Silent Assassin suggests something even more unsettling. According to the book, before the infamous day, Atta may have entertained a completely different plan.
According to firsthand testimony in the book, Atta appeared in Florida in April or May of 2000. It was six weeks earlier than the official U.S. records suggest. He entered a USDA office in Homestead, south of Miami, and requested a government loan of $650,000.
What was his purpose? To purchase and retrofit a small aircraft into a crop duster.
The story comes from Johnelle Bryant. She is a senior loan officer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her memory is sharp. In interviews and the pages of Parallax 9/11, she recounts how Atta discussed removing passenger seats and installing chemical tanks in a plane to spray “substances.” She challenged the feasibility of this application and noted that he wasn’t a farmer, had no money, no farm, no business plan, and had just moved to the United States. But Atta persisted, growing increasingly agitated.
The conversation became even more alarming when Atta spoke about Osama Bin Laden and praised him as a great leader. He asked Bryant what stopped him from slitting her throat and taking the money from the safe in her office. (The safe, it turned out, was empty.) He stared at her with what she described as “evil black eyes.” It was a chilling encounter she never forgot—and when she later saw his face on the news, she knew it had been him.
If Atta’s initial plan involved converting a small aircraft for chemical dispersion, it raises questions that few have dared to ask: Was 9/11 Plan B?
The implications are enormous. It suggests Atta may have first explored the idea of a biological or chemical attack. Crop dusters, after all, are perfectly suited for low-flying dispersal. Chemicals like sarin, chlorine, or anthrax agents, once weaponized in warfare, could have been spread across American soil with devastating effect.
So what stopped him? Was the plan too difficult to execute? Did he pivot to something more visually spectacular and logistically feasible, like hijacking commercial airliners? Or was the crop duster story itself a calculated distraction, an intelligence test, a probe to see how easy it was to move through federal systems and remain under the radar?
The truth may never be fully known. But what is known is that the encounter with Johnelle Bryant happened. She passed a lie detector test. She described Atta’s appearance, mannerisms, and voice long before his face was on every screen in America.
While the media and reports may have submerged the other side of the story, the narrative Parallax 9/11: The Silent Assassin asks what almost happened. It’s a perspective shift, a parallax view, that forces us to consider not just the tragedy that unfolded but the horrors that might have been narrowly avoided, or could have been taking shape by someone in the current times..
Atta’s original plan, if it was indeed a chemical attack, adds a terrifying new dimension to the 9/11 story as it reframes Atta not just as a fanatic with a pilot’s license but as a man experimenting with methods of mass destruction, adapting strategies based on opportunity, rejection, and response.
And if that’s true, the story of 9/11 began much earlier than we thought, and it could have ended in ways far worse than the world has yet imagined. For additional information and more details on this subject, we recommend reading Parallax 9/11: The Silent Assassin.
You can purchase your copy from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1917438575.