Flight Instructor Gets $5 Million for Tip on Moussaoui

By Anastacia Mott Austin

This week Clarence "Clancy" Prevost, 70, a former Minnesota flight instructor, received $5 million from the federal government’s Reward for Justice program for tipping the FBI off about suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

Moussaoui had attended Minnesota’s Pan Am International Flight Academy shortly before the September 11th attacks.

Justice Department representatives told reporters that Prevost (though they did not reveal his name to the press), a former Navy pilot, was honored at a private ceremony on Thursday at the State Department and given the sizable check for his help.

But two fellow workers of Prevost’s say it was they, and not Prevost, who called the FBI with their suspicions of Moussaoui. They say Moussaoui made them suspicious for wanting to learn immediately how to fly a Boeing 747, rather than the Cessna planes the school typically started their students with.

Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims, also flight instructors at the Eagan, Minnesota flight school, told reporters that Prevost didn’t even put the call in to the FBI; they did.

"Clancy didn’t call. The fact is, the two of us did," said Nelson, 47, to reporters.

The two reportedly placed separate calls to the FBI an hour apart on the same August day in 2001, saying that his behavior had aroused their suspicions. The flight school’s director, Alan McHale, backs up their story, saying that he doesn’t recall Prevost suggesting a call to the FBI, but that Sims and Nelson were "screaming to me [to call]."

Sims, 68, told the press, "[I’m] surprised and flabbergasted that there was even money for doing what we should have done in the first place," adding that if a reward had to be given, it should have been split three ways.

But Justice Department representatives said that Prevost, a key witness in the Moussaoui trial, assisted the government in other ways that they couldn’t reveal to the press.

During the trial Prevost revealed to court prosecutors that Moussaoui had paid $6,800 of the $8,300 tuition with 100-dollar bills, which made him suspicious, along with Moussaoui’s grand ambitions for flying jumbo jets despite very few logged flight-hours. Other reports state that suspicions were raised when Moussaoui showed no interest in learning the functions associated with takeoffs or landings, only flight operations.

Sims and Nelson were honored by a Senate resolution in 2005 for their help, but neither had any inkling that such a large sum of money was going to be awarded to their co-worker.

The Reward for Justice program has been in effect since 1975, and has awarded over $82 million to 50 people over its lifetime, for thwarting attacks or providing information that has led to the prosecution of terror suspects. The reward to Prevost was the first and thus far only one given by the program to a United States’ citizen for information about the 9/11 attacks.