Case Convar: Evidence of Foreknowledge of the 9/11 Attacks

After the 9/11 attacks, international investigations were launched into financial transactions that seemed to indicate foreknowledge about the coming catastrophe.¹ For its part, a technology firm named Convar, located in Pirmasens, Germany, had been tasked by the U.S. Department of Defense to restore data on damaged hard drives gathered from the ruins of the destroyed WTC skyscrapers. These investigations stemmed from suspicious and untracked transactions – up to 100 million dollars – carried out using WTC computers right before the attack, pointing to foreknowledge of the total destruction of the evidence.

In what follows it will be demonstrated that Convar’s investigations were followed and reported by global media in 2001–2002, and that in 2003 the FBI denied that they had ever been carried out. Pliantly, the media became silent about the investigations, and the 9/11 Commission did not mention them at all in its report.

Media Reports about the Investigations

Reuters², CNN³, Der Spiegel⁴ and others reported about the progress of this computer forensics⁵ investigation.

In the Reuters article, FBI was named as a client. Convar’s director Peter Henschel is quoted as saying that

”the companies in the United States were working together with the FBI to piece together what happened Sept 11 and that he was confident the destination of the dubious transactions would one day be tracked down.”

News coverage continued into 2002. Four months after the disaster, Germany’s TV channel ProSieben visited Convar’s laboratory⁶ and documented the process of restoring data from one WTC hard drive.

In March 2002, Germany’s ZDF (Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen) in their ”Heute Journal” program visited Convar’s laboratory, interviewing the employees and documenting the examination of WTC hard drives.⁷ It was reported that, by then, the company had already succeeded in restoring data from over 400 hard drives and that the drives had been sent by the U.S. Department of Defense (”Verteidigungsministerium”).

According to an article in German technology magazine Techfieber, the hard drives were sent from the USA to Ramstein, Germany, and from there in a special transport to Pirmasens.⁸ The article notes that, on average, about 400 hard drives are processed in the laboratory every month.

”Per Flugzeug wurden sie aus den USA nach Ramstein und danach mit einem Spezialtransporter in das westpfälzische Pirmasens gebracht. […] Rund 400 Datenrettungen werden pro Monat bei Convar in Pirmasens abgewickelt.”

A German press portal notes that by September 2002, the company had been provided 1,250 hard drives from WTC, with the assignment ”restore all data that can be restored”.⁹ (”Dies soll nun die deutsche Firma Convar mit Sitz in Pirmasens verhindern, ihr liegen 1250 Festplatten aus dem World Trade Center vor. Der Auftrag der amerikanischen Ämter lautet: retten, was zu retten ist.”)

On September 11, 2002, German radio aired a program in which their team visited Convar’s laboratory and interviewed the company’s employees.¹⁰ The team understood that the employees were not allowed to mention Convar’s U.S. partners, but they noted that the U.S. Department of Defense was marked as the sender of a hard drive shipment they saw.

The FBI’s Denial

Fast forward to 2003, when the 9/11 Commission had a briefing about the 9/11 insider trading investigations with the FBI. The members of the Commission asked the FBI, perhaps somewhat leadingly, about

”persistent press reports that a [sic] certain damaged hard-drives had been recovered from the WTC site and sent to Germany, where a company was working to restore them. These press reports contend that large volumes of suspicious transactions flowed through computers housed in the WTC on the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit but ill-defined effort to profit from the attacks”.¹¹

In its briefing memorandum, the Commission states that the

”assembled [FBI] agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort or the alleged scheme. Moreover, one of the New York agents pointed out, from personal experience, that everything at the WTC was pulverized to near power [sic], making it extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived to the extent they [sic] data be recovered.”

Based on the FBI’s statement, in its final report published in 2004, the Commission did not mention Convar’s widely publicized WTC hard drive investigations. The topic was also never again addressed officially, and it was dropped from mainstream media reporting.

However, in September 10, 2006, the Dutch investigative program Zembla resurrected the issue by interviewing Convar’s spokesperson, who replied that the company cannot give any further information but made ”creatively” clear that it sticks with its earlier reports. One of Convar’s early press reports, from February 14, 2002, notes:

”In mid-November, CONVAR Deutschland started work on the recovery of data from hard disks from the World Trade Center and neighbouring buildings. The use of the latest techniques, the long experience of the German specialists and the high security standards of the Data Recovery Center in Germany led many US companies and state institutions to decide to entrust CONVAR with the recovery of sensitive data. (see. SAT1 video – On the Traces of 11th September / Galileo – FBI Investigators Waiting for Data)”¹²